Minecraft Inventory Redesign

Role: UI/UX Designer | Project Type: Academic Solo | Duration: 3 Weeks | Tools: Figma & Adobe Photoshop

Overview

Project Introduction

Minecraft has added hundreds of new items since it first released, but its inventory hasn’t evolved alongside them. The current inventory system while simple and familiar, struggles to scale with the amount of content in the game. For my UX Design course, I was tasked with identifying the pain points in the existing inventory system and designing an intuitive interface that could better support the current item pool and future updates.

Minecraft’s Current Inventory - Bedrock Edition

Survival Mode

Creative Mode

Competitive Analysis

Preliminary Research

  • First I looked at games with inventory systems similar to Minecraft to see how they improve the player experience.

    • This initial research helped me plan my user survey by highlighting gaps in Minecraft’s inventory that other games try to solve.

While reviewing these games, I focused on 3 things:

  1. What features they include

  2. How well those features have scaled over time

  3. Pain points players still report that I would want to avoid in my own redesign

Terraria: Minecraft’s 2D Cousin

Organization Features:

  • Sort Inventory to organize items by type

  • Favorite item lock that prevents players from quick trashing an item, or moving them by accident

  • Quick stack to a nearby chest function that moves matching items to a chest nearby

Scalability:

  • Scales well as new items are added due to QOL features like sorting and quick stacking to nearby chests

User Pain Points:

  • Inventory fills up very quickly, forcing players to stop and spend time reorganizing and managing their items

Dragon Quest Builders 2: A Sandbox RPG

Organization Features:

  • Provides shortcuts for quickly moving items between slots and containers

  • Includes auto sorting that groups similar items together

Scalability:

  • Uses a centralized storage system called a Coffer to help players manage their inventory over time

  • Limits how many chests can be placed in world, which reduces how well the system scales as players collect more items

User Pain Points:

  • Chest limits interrupt the player’s ability to store and organize building materials and other items

Subnautica: Deep Sea Survival

Organization Features:

  • Organization tools are limited by design, but players can pin recipes to see required materials while exploring

  • Players mostly rely on long-term storage like base lockers, with a lack of immediate on-the-go storage

Scalability:

  • Does not scale as well as other inventories, since fixed lockers limit where items can be stored and make new items harder to integrate

User Pain Points:

  • Resources cannot be stacked and each one takes up its own slot, which limits player efficiency

  • Traveling back and forth to lockers takes time away from the more enjoyable parts of the game

Key Takeaways

QoL features like filtering and sorting become increasingly important as the amount of in-game items grow

Storage friction can pull players away from their favorite parts of gameplay

Inventory systems that centralize or simplify storage still need to respect how players mentally organize their items

Conducting User Research

User Survey

  • I ran a short user survey to understand how different Minecraft players manage their inventory depending on what they are doing in the game, and whether the inventory causes friction during those activities.

  • My goal was to validate common pain points like clutter and navigation issues, to see which game activities they affect the most and where those pain points overlap.

Survey Design

Player Profiles

Problem Statement

Proposed Solutions

Retrospective