• GAME TYPE: 4 player co-operative FPS

  • Studio: Starbreeze Studios

  • Location: Stockhlom, sweden

  • Release Year: 2023

  • My Role: UI & UX Design

  • Team size: 80-120 PEOPLE

  • My involvement: Pre-production > Production > Post release updates

  • GAAS: Monthly free updates, DLC, Game modes, Playable heist, etc.

My Contributions on the Project

Product Owner - Meta Feature Team

  • Owned prioritization and direction of meta features, aligning player experience goals with production scope and timelines

  • Collaborated closely with design, engineering, and production to define feature requirements and deliverables

  • Ensured cohesive UX across progression, social, and meta systems, supporting long-term engagement and scalability

UI/UX Lead & Senior UI/UX designer

  • Led the UI/UX team, aligning design direction with gameplay needs and production constraints for a large-scale multiplayer experience

  • Defined and maintained scalable UI design systems to ensure consistency across menus, HUD, and in-game interfaces

  • Drove a strong focus on clarity, readability, and responsiveness for player-facing design in fast-paced cooperative gameplay

  • Took part and co-operated in Art direction for the UI visuals & conceptual presentation.

Payday 3 - UX Case:

In-Game Communication

In Payday 3, four players cooperate to plan, infiltrate, and execute complex heists. These heists can transition between stealth and loud combat at any time due to player actions, which makes team communication essential. My role was to I define & design the in-game communication systems. Solutions we shipped with was text chat, communication wheel, and pinging to support fast, reliable cooperation across platforms and input types.

The system needed to work seamlessly whether players used controller or mouse & keyboard, and whether they were playing with friends, strangers, or cross-platform teammates.

The Solution We Shipped

We built a communication system that worked whether the player had a keyboard or a controller—and whether they were in total stealth or complete chaos.

  • Defined user needs + gameplay requirements

  • Built low-fi sketches → wireframes → prototypes for rapid testing

  • Fast iterative cycles with engineering to align with UE5 & Nebula constraints

  • Continuous in-house testing to validate usability during high-pressure gameplay

Communication Wheel

A fast radial interface delivering pre-configured callouts like:
Follow me. Need Ammo. Stay Here. Medic Bag here.
One flick of the stick or mouse—instant communication.

Text Chat

Accessible, cross-platform, and able to receive messages from the wheel—for players who preferred quick text-based coordination.

Each component worked alone, but together they formed a communication network that adapted to any playstyle.

Ping System

Players could mark:

  • Guards (critical for stealth)

  • Objectives

  • Loot bags

  • Points of interest

Everyone immediately saw the marker in the world.

Impact

The shift was immediate in internal playtests.

Groups that previously struggled without voice chat were suddenly coordinating:

  • Enabled coordination without voice chat

  • Reduced friction in party formation

  • Improved clarity during stealth coordination”

Post-launch, when we added crossplay voice chat, teams meshed even more smoothly. The communication wheel and ping system remained essential for precision callouts, but now voice added a personal layer on top. Together, these systems created the most cooperative version of Payday we had ever shipped.

Key Implementation Techniques


I worked with the UI engineers to structure the wheel as a modular hierarchy:

  1. Base Widget (RadialLayout)

  2. Child Elements (WheelSlice (Icon + label + navigation logic))

  3. Context Layer (PingContext, StealthContext, LoudContext)


The communication wheel triggered structured “message packets”:

  • Network-Safe (Nebula/AccelByte)

    • Message Type (Follow Me / Need Ammo / Guard Ping)

    • Sender ID

    • Delivery Channel (text chat or UI marker)

(Low-fi sketches to show the Idea of a communication wheel for callouts.)

(In-game text chat, cross-platform, quick-access)

(Ping system for marking enemies, objects, bags, and world locations)

(Final implemented screenshot from current shipped build)

(This just a example of Unreal 4 Blueprint, not the actual.)

Surprising findings:

  • Players used pings and wheel callouts 4–5× more often during stealth.

  • Players Used the Wheel to “Talk Emotionally,” Not Just Tactically. During testing, players started using “Thank you,” “Shit,” and “Hi”
    as emotional shorthand, almost like emotes.

The Challenge

One of the features that I owned UI/UX design wise was In-game communication. Payday 3 is a game where everything can change in a heartbeat.

During early playtests we tracked several indicators that highlighted the communication problem:

  • ~65% of stealth failures originated from uncoordinated player actions (e.g., multiple players killing guards and wasted “pagers”).

  • Teams without voice chat completed high-difficulty heists at less than half the rate of voice-enabled teams.

  • Controller players were much slower at typing or using ad-hoc chat inputs, leading to missed timing windows.

These metrics pointed to a clear conclusion:
Players weren’t failing due to lack of skill, they lacked a fast, accessible communication layer.

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