Game HUD Design Checklist: What to Check Before Launch

HUDs, or heads-up displays, are one of the most common types of UI I work on. Almost every game has some form of HUD, and it is often central to the gameplay experience, showing players important information when they need it and helping them make decisions.

This makes UX particularly important when designing a HUD. Bad UX in a settings menu might frustrate your players, but it probably won’t stop them from playing the game. A HUD that doesn’t show information when it’s needed, is difficult to read, or becomes too cluttered can make a game significantly harder—or even impossible—for some players to play.

So, before you consider your HUD finished, here are some of the things I recommend checking.

Information Hierarchy

Your HUD will live and die by its information hierarchy. The most important information needs to be shown prominently, and players should be able to understand the relative importance of different HUD elements at a glance.

Not every piece of information deserves the same amount of attention. Consider what the player needs to know immediately, what they need to check regularly, and what can remain secondary until it becomes relevant.

Extra tip: Don’t rely on colour alone to communicate information hierarchy, such as using brighter colours to indicate more important information. For players with colour vision deficiencies, these differences may be difficult or impossible to distinguish.

Instead, reinforce the hierarchy through other design choices such as size, shape, placement and animation. This also makes the hierarchy more robust for everyone, particularly when the HUD is being viewed against a busy or changing game environment.

Checklist

• Is the most important information the easiest to notice?
• Does the placement of information follow established conventions where appropriate?
  Players bring expectations from other games with them. If you’re placing information somewhere unexpected, check whether there is a good UX or gameplay reason for doing so.
• Does secondary information stay secondary?
  Make sure less important elements aren’t competing with critical gameplay information for the player’s attention.
• Is anything being displayed permanently that only needs to appear contextually?
  Consider whether some information could appear only when it becomes relevant, reducing the amount of information the player has to process during normal gameplay.
• Does the hierarchy change when the player’s priorities change
  Information that is secondary during normal gameplay may suddenly become critical, for example, low health, an expiring objective or a newly applied status effect. Make sure the HUD can appropriately draw attention to these changes.

Readability

When designing a HUD, ideally your mockups should be tested against a range of backgrounds, including bright, dark and visually busy scenes. Remember that the player isn’t just reading the HUD—they’re also playing the game and processing everything happening around it.

This makes it important to test your HUD across different environments and during both low and high-intensity gameplay. Text size, font choice, contrast and spacing can also have a huge impact on readability.

Checklist

• Can you read the HUD during combat and movement?
  Don’t only test your HUD while the game is paused or the player is standing still. Something that looks perfectly readable in a mockup may become much harder to process when the player is moving quickly and concentrating on gameplay.
• Does it remain readable against bright, dark and visually noisy environments?
  Test HUD elements across a representative range of environments from your game rather than designing against a single background.
• Are text and icons readable at the player’s expected viewing distance?
  Remember that console players may be sitting several metres away from a TV, while PC players may be much closer to their monitor. Test the HUD under the conditions your players are actually likely to experience.
• Does the HUD still work with longer localized text?
  Try replacing your text with longer strings. Does everything still fit comfortably, or does text become cramped, overlap other elements or get cut off?

Player Attention

Designing a HUD also means designing the direction of the player’s attention. The player has a limited amount of attention to divide between the game world and the HUD, and where that attention needs to be can change depending on what is happening in the game.

Information that needs an immediate response may need to actively draw the player’s attention, while less urgent information should be available without unnecessarily distracting them from gameplay.

Checklist

• Where does the player actually need to look?
  Consider where the player’s attention is naturally focused during gameplay and how far they need to look away from the action to find important information.
• Are important notifications competing with gameplay?
  Notifications shouldn’t demand so much attention that the player misses something more important happening in the game.
• Are elements positioned appropriately for how urgently they’re needed?
  Information that needs to be checked frequently or acted on quickly may benefit from being closer to the player’s normal area of focus.
• Do any HUD elements obscure important gameplay visuals?
  Test during real gameplay rather than relying only on mockups. Pay particular attention to moments when several HUD elements, notifications or effects are visible at once.
• Are too many elements trying to attract the player’s attention at the same time?
  Animation, flashing, sound and other attention-grabbing techniques become less effective when everything is using them. Reserve stronger signals for information that genuinely needs the player’s attention.

Feedback

Giving the player appropriate feedback is one of the most important functions of good UI/UX design. The player should be able to understand what happened, why it happened, and when something has changed.

For things like timers and cooldowns, it should be visually clear when they have completed and an action is available again. If the player is taking damage, the HUD should clearly communicate that damage is happening—and, where appropriate, help them understand where it is coming from.

Checklist

• Does the HUD clearly communicate important gameplay events?
  Consider damage, healing, cooldowns, status effects, pickups, objective changes, unavailable actions and other events relevant to your game.
• Can the player tell why something happened?
  Showing that the player’s health decreased is useful, but communicating why it decreased gives them information they can actually respond to.
• Is it clear when a state changes?
  For example, can the player easily recognise when a cooldown has finished, an ability becomes available, a status effect expires or an objective updates?
• Is the feedback appropriate to the importance of the event?
  Minor events shouldn’t compete for attention with information that requires an immediate response.
• Can simultaneous feedback still be understood?
  Test what happens when several events occur close together, such as taking damage while receiving a pickup notification and completing an objective.