JIGSAW NIGHT
Role
Timeline
Team
Skills
Jigsaw Night is a shared virtual puzzle experience designed to bring people closer, one piece at a time. UI Update and new assets currently live on the Meta Quest Store.
Final Design
Takeaways
Design becomes stronger when it is built through close collaboration.
Working closely with the Jigsaw Night team taught me how to balance visual polish, technical feasibility, product goals, and player-facing clarity throughout the design process.
New platforms require new UI conventions.
Jigsaw Night has an incredible breadth of features, and making it feel intuitive for all ages is even harder. Through competitive research, spatial UI references, and iteration, I defined interaction patterns that made Jigsaw Night feel intuitive while still embracing the new behaviors of mixed reality.
Design Problem
How might we make Jigsaw Night feel easier to navigate, more polished, but still playful?
Jigsaw Night had already built a strong foundation as a social puzzle game, but the interface needed a clearer visual system to support the product’s growing features. The original interface had many of the right tools, but the experience needed stronger hierarchy, smoother navigation, and a more cohesive personality. As part of the UI refresh, my goal was to help make the app feel more approachable for new players while still supporting the depth of a cross-platform mixed reality experience.
Previous Jigsaw Night UI
What if familiar interfaces could make mixed reality feel easier to enter?
The refresh became about bringing recognizable UI patterns into a more playful, spatial context. Instead of designing every screen as a new behavior to learn, we used familiar interface logic as a starting point, then reshaped it through Jigsaw Night’s cozy social atmosphere.
Process
Mapping Out the Information Architecture
Before changing the visual design, I needed to understand how Jigsaw Night was structured. The existing app had already been built with many functional features in place, but there was no centralized design file or documented interface system to reference. To redesign it thoughtfully, I first mapped out the app’s information architecture. This helped me understand how players moved through the experience, where major features lived, and which screens needed clearer relationships to each other. By turning the existing app into a visual map, I could identify repeated patterns, navigation gaps, and opportunities to create a more organized UI system.
Researching to similar interfaces
After mapping the app structure, I researched interfaces that solved similar navigation and interaction problems. Since Jigsaw Night includes a dashboard, camera tools, multiplayer flows, and customization features, I looked at products outside of puzzle games to understand how different interface types organize content, guide decisions, and make complex tools feel approachable. This research helped me avoid designing each screen in isolation. Instead, I used familiar interface patterns as starting points, then adapted them to fit Jigsaw Night’s social, playful, and spatial experience.
Designing a Clearer Dashboard
Turning many features into simple entry points
The dashboard became the foundation for the UI refresh. Jigsaw Night had a lot to offer, but the challenge was deciding how to group those features in a way that felt natural. I explored a layout system that felt closer to an Apple TV-style home screen, where large visual cards could create clear entry points instead of overwhelming players with lists or dense menus. The bento layout helped make the interface feel more inviting. It allowed important actions, puzzle content, multiplayer options, and customization features to live together in a more visual and scannable way.
UI Set
Finishing the dashboard helped us understand the balance of skeuomorphism we wanted for the rest of the app. The UI needed to feel more polished and object-like, but not so realistic that it distracted from the puzzle experience. Once that balance felt right, I carried the same design logic into other core screens, including the camera UI, camera frame, puzzle builder, and multiplayer flow. Each screen had a different job, but they all needed to feel like part of the same product. The goal was to create a system where functional tools felt clearer, while still giving Jigsaw Night a more playful and recognizable interface language.
Camera UI
Puzzle Builder, Multiplayer Settings
Current Design
Core Experience
Reel with Features
Main Key Art
Backdrop Key Art
Thank you!
Beyond the UI work, this project gave me valuable insight into what it means to design for a growing XR product, from shaping interface conventions to thinking through how players experience social features across platforms. Thank you to Steve for bringing me onto the Jigsaw Night team and giving me the opportunity to contribute to this update. I’m grateful for the mentorship he provided throughout the process, especially as I continue learning how to navigate the XR design space. I’m excited to hear what players think of the new update, and to finally sit down and finish a few puzzles myself.