Rival Peak was an experimental Massively Interactive Live Event (MILE) Survivor-style reality show with AI contestants whose fate was determined by real-time audience votes on Facebook. I designed the UI for an experience that had never been built before.
I took Rival Peak's UI from blank canvas to live product: early proof-of-concept flows, fully functional UX wireframes, visual style development, mobile optimization, and direct collaboration with Genvid's engineers on HTML/CSS implementation.
Identifying the problem
Building UI for a live event meant designing before the experience fully existed. Rival Peak launched before the UI was complete. Problems surfaced in front of thousands of real users, not in testing. I had to wireframe aggressively, ship fast, and iterate in real time all while working with a separate engineering studio for implementation.
We ran design and development in parallel, wireframing every interaction before it went live and rebuilding anything that broke under real user load. The product shipped, evolved, and held up across a full season which was a result of fast iteration and keeping the feedback loop tight with Genvid's engineering team
The Work
Home Stream - User Information and general overview of characters
Character Stream - Individual character, their goals, user contribution
Wireframing
The first job was turning abstract design docs into something the team could navigate and react to. Fully functional wireframes gave everyone from producers to engineers a shared understanding of the experience before a single pixel was styled.
Initial Mockups
After coming to agreements on the user flow, I began an initial exploration of differing styles based on the initial desire from the team to have the UI be minimal. These explorations were meant to be a starting point for the overall tone we wanted the game to represent.
Closer to Target
These mockups were used to explore tone through texture and color to try and emphasize a look that paired well with the scenery. The art director approved the third of the mockups above, and I moved forward with creating a cohesive, fun, and vibrant UI system that played on 70’s tropes and the pacific northwest.
The icon system had two requirements: readable at small scale and distinguishable at a glance on mobile. Several objectives had no pre-existing visual metaphor, so I developed original iconography from scratch. Each mark was designed to be distinctly shaped and impossible to confuse with another under fast-paced conditions