Challenge
Fortnite has over 650 million users worldwide which creates a difficult problem in the world of UX. We need to design something that is going to be intuitive for various kinds of people around the world. Currently it is a bit bulky and convoluted so if it is possible, we need to make it simple and efficient.
Goals
My goal is to think through what the end user could be frustrated with and solve the those problems while not taking away any advantages that the current design offers. I want to make a layout that can make the most sense to most popular use cases. After my initial sketches and solving the problems I see, I will ask other users what other issues need to be addressed.
Sketching
Currently, the system is broken up by the Cosmetic, Emotes, and Lobby categories and you can have loadouts based on those categories. This has been difficult for me to get used to because there are some emotes I only want with certain characters and also certain loading screens I'd like with certain characters. I believe Epic Games updated to their current style because they wanted to give their players more options with their load outs, but unfortunately it was not well received.
In order to accomplish their goal while also keeping things intuitive for the end user, I made a scrollable left column for loadouts which have every category that your character could be customized with. By clicking on a loadout, it shows the options you have to customize your character. This is a simple change, but an effective one. However, the next steps will show why this layout works to accomplish the goal.
This is very similar to how it is already when you click on a subcategory like Character for instance. What I decided is that adding just one additional option could really change the game (pun intended) for customization. Once you've selected a subcategory, you have the option of selecting multiple characters.
Upon clicking the multiple box, a done button will appear to the right of the menu. You can then select as many characters as you want and then hit done and that will tell the game for this loadout you would like to randomly cycle through these characters. This would be a great addition since the game also has themes. One could make a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles layout or even a Marvel or Star Wars Layout. There are more options we will probably need to add as well, but I think this is a good start to making progress on improving the UI of Fortnite's Locker system.
What's Next?
I will be posting my sketches to Reddit to ask users if this would resolve their current frustrations with the layout and if there's any problems my design creates. Understanding the problems people different than me face allows me to design not just for me but for everyone.