Rockstar Games brought me in post-launch to evaluate what shipped, documenting what was working, what should be preserved, and where future updates could go further.
What came out of it: 18 findings documented across four interface systems, two prioritized recommendations delivered to the product team, and some minor in-world UI changes shipped.
Red Dead Redemption 2 launched in October 2018. I came in that same month as a UX consultant and worked through to March 2019, about six months, on an as-needed basis rather than as embedded staff. The job was to look hard at an interface that was already finished and already in players' hands, and to be useful about it.
RDR2 shipped with genuinely strong UX decisions throughout its core interface systems. My evaluation documented those strengths alongside specific opportunities giving Rockstar a clear picture of what to preserve and what to address in future updates.
Rockstar Games
Each screen was evaluated for design decisions worth preserving, areas of player friction, and notable choices to document for future development. Click any screen to expand the full findings.
Click any screen to expand the findings. The four screens above are official Red Dead Redemption 2 game captures, © Rockstar Games, annotated here for review.
Of the five opportunities identified, two rose to the top as high-impact, low-complexity improvements recommended for a future content update.
Reviewing a finished product is mostly a series of judgment calls about what to say and how much of it. These are the three that shaped the report, and what each one cost.
Options Report only what was broken, which is the shorter and more conventional audit, or record strengths and notable decisions alongside the opportunities.
Chose Three categories: design strengths, opportunities, and notable decisions worth documenting.
Why This interface was already shipped and largely working. The adaptive HUD cores hiding during safe exploration is the clearest example: the most useful thing I could tell the team about it was do not touch this, and extend it. A problems-only report gives a team no way to know what it would be breaking.
Options Hand over all five opportunities with equal weight and let the team triage, or rank them and formally recommend only the few that were worth a content update.
Chose Two recommendations, picked for high player impact against low implementation complexity: the missing accessibility settings category, and the item wheel clarity changes.
Why A post-launch update on a shipped title has limited room. Five equally weighted asks is a list someone else has to prioritize, which usually means nothing moves.
Options Rework the wheel's layout to solve the icon memorization problem properly, or leave the structure alone and add only labeling and a depth indicator.
Chose Two additive changes: text labels on the icon slots, and a passive indicator showing item depth at rest instead of the easily missed "1 of 3" counter.
Why The wheel's real strengths are structural. It blurs the world without hiding it, keeps the minimap live, and reaches all three inventory contexts from one hold gesture. A layout redesign spends all of that to fix a learnability problem that labels address directly.
Evaluating RDR2 post-launch was a reminder that the best UX work is often invisible. The adaptive HUD cores hiding during exploration, the world breathing without interference works because players never notice it. They just feel less stressed. That’s the goal. When I’m doing my job well, nobody knows I was there.
Angela Clemons UX ConsultantGame UX demands a different kind of discipline than enterprise or product design. The user has chosen to be challenged. Your interface cannot be the challenge. Every pixel of HUD, every menu interaction, every moment of cognitive load is borrowed from the player’s attention and borrowed attention has to be paid back in experience.