Can I be of service to lower the barrier of learning Unity?

This is for folks who work at Unity,

Context:

• I'm a UX designer and researcher learning Unity to do lightweight prototyping for XR. Also to build empathy for devs who work in Unity.
• It's been rather challenging to learn Unity, to say the least. Not only because the subject matter is vast (especially coming from 2D), and the tool is incredibly robust. But because of all of these unique quirks that Unity has as a tool.
• In short, I'm spending so much time trying to understand how and why Unity behaves in a certain way, rather than getting better at making prototypes themselves (I get that these two are connected)

I'd love to be of service to the Unity game engine team (or maybe the Ultra team or Learn team)

• I'd love to be a test-subject, feedback-giver, co-designer, collaborator, usability tester, etc to anyone at Unity trying to lower the barrier of entry and learning for Unity.
• How can I be of help/service? I'd love to make it easier for other non-technical folks to learn Unity.

PS. I'm mindful that Unity has been around for a long while, and that any change to such robust tool and serving a large user base is tricky, to say the least.

 

Tried this page?
https://careers.unity.com/

Other than that, I think the best way is to make both written and video guides (written is easily upgradable, while video can be clearer). Also can be monetized if you see it as a job

 

Just so you know, this forum is provided for Unity end-users to help each other. It was never meant to be a way to contact Unity. While a few Unity employees occasionally browse the forum, it's extremely unlikely that whoever you're trying to appeal-to will ever see your post.

 

Fair point kdgalla, and good call out. I was actually encouraged by a Unity employee to post on the forums. But I suspected that there's not that much visibility here.

 

Thanks DevDunk. I don't think I'm at the level of knowledge that I can even write a tutorial. And yes I had checked out the careers page. Which was what led me to try and make myself available to any teams trying to make Unity simpler to learn by making the product more streamlined (good idea on the Careers page regardless)

There's apparently a team called Ultra Simple Creation, from the careers page:

"Unity’s Ultra Simple Creation (Ultra) team is building out new creative tools that will inspire and enable entirely new markets of makers! Your role will be to help design a collaborative web-first and mobile design product from the ground up.

This team and product are extensions of Unity’s belief that the world is better with more creators in it. Specifically, Ultra is highly targeted at the extensive number of everyday, common creative tasks that ordinary people have to do. We make it easier than ever to make beautiful, high quality creations.

This role is especially pivotal as an early employee in an internal zero-to-one ‘startup’. You will work alongside product & engineering, and specifically contribute to key workflows ranging from templates to interactivity, animation and 3D. If you are a product designer who has been disappointed or frustrated by the lack of accessible design tools for animation and 3D, this is your chance to make that product come to life!"

Unity is not only challenging because it's dealing with a complex subject matter (interactive 3d experiences). But also because its user experience as a tool could be simplified/improved. To use an analogy, learning Unity is like learning to fly with a fighter jet. Learning to fly is already tricky business (massive understatement), but learning to fly a fighter jet when you've never flown anything, is even more difficult. This challenge could be tackled in different ways. Maybe it's best to start with a smaller, easier to handle plane, and then slowly work your competence up. Alternatively, you could make flight a jet fighter as easy to fly as a small plane (much harder to do).

 

If you're not at the level of writing small tutorials, you probably are not going to get into Unity anytime soon

 

You've just answered your own question. You need to know a subject to be able to assist with a subject. Otherwise you're just like a blind person trying to lead another blind person.

 

Try https://unity.com/unity-pulse

 

I'm sure that in the literal case this happens all the time, quite successfully.

But where "blind" is a metaphor for the first stage of competence, then yeah, I agree entirely.

Game dev is an inherently UX-heavy field. Unity's issue on this front isn't a lack of availablee information and knowledge about how to make it better, it's a combination of a) baggage carried from historical events and decisions, and b) a lack of resources assigned to making things better.

Do keep your expectations of "easier" realistic. Game dev is an inherently technical field. Expecting non-technical people to be able to develop games easily is akin to expecting non-musical people to play an instrument. It's certainly possible, but they're going to become a bit musical along the way.

There are game and content development systems deliberately designed for people at the entry level, with fully drag-and-drop interfaces, truly little or no need to understand how computers / code work to get started, and all of the limitations which necessarily come with that. Construct immediately comes to mind.

 

Honestly, probably the most straightforward way (on paper) is to get a job at Unity and then try and apply your skills & knowledge internally.

 

I'm not sure Unity knows what a UX designer / engineer is
Some of their systems are just plain awful when it comes to UX and more so workflow.

 

Unity has plenty of UX Designers and Engineers.

 

Put them to work please

 

They are working! But maybe you can also join Unity and lend your UX experience? Or share more actionable/specific feedback here?

 

I have done that my friend for years. For example why you can't click a mesh on a lightmap and the mesh is selected in scene view. Among several others.

 

This is what I'm referring to. Yes Game dev and interactive 3D creation (to included other use cases like architecure, film, automotive, etc) is inherently complex and multifaceted. But the tools can be made more predictable and useful. Also maybe there can be ramp-up plugins that make some of the basics functionality easier.

So it's a two-fold strategy perhaps:

- In general, how might Unity become more useful and more consistent for everyone. Experts and newcomers alike, so they can focus their time on building and developing and less time on setting up and troubleshooting (to use a couple of examples)?

- How might Unity simplify the onboarding of new users, giving them the tools to do useful projects while teaching progressively what Unity in its fullness can do? This could look like add-ons or versions of Unity that are more streamlined for the learner (like a Unity on training wheels, without all of the robust customizations it can do, without having to individually download a bunch of packages, for example)

Ultimately this is all about business, and not Unity doing their users a and more easily acquiring new users. This is a fairly common business strategy. For example, Adobe created Lightroom as a response to a more simple photo editing software than their flagship Photoshop. But they still made certain features in Photoshop easier, like how to remove backgrounds with only a few clicks (before you had to do all of this trickery with layers, masking, magic lasso, etc).

 

On the flip side, it could be that from a business strategy, Unity does not want to appeal to non-techincal folks. This is also a valid strategy. My hypothesis, is that most paying customers of Unity are deep experts who are highly accustomed to Unity's idiosyncrasies, not newcomers like me who are using the platform for free.

Also learning Unity is a sunk cost that could make users more attached to Unity and therefore less likely to drop the platfrom altogether (ie. "I've spent all of this time learning Unity and with all of these headaches, I'm just gonna stick to Unity rather than learn a different platform"). So this trial by fire makes creates a greater attachment to the platform.

However that does not address new user acquisition altogether.

 

Technical folk want great UX too.

 

They have already brought many improvements such as Pivot/Center and Local/Global requiring a drop-down menu, a second of lag when opening any closed component, no way to toggle Vsync on/off while playing, and no way to change the grid size unless in Global mode.

And as soon as the survey results come back, they'll be straight on to more great features.

 

With all due respect there is a lot of idle speculation going on. Unity isn't an "easy" tool mostly because design and software development are inherently difficult tasks. It would be nice if was "easier" (whatever that means because people who don't get it don't agree on that) but that cannot ever be the case. The target moves as each milestone is met. People today aren't solving the same problems they were solving 25 years ago and new problems remain hard.

Frankly software development is so difficult that the majority of software developers really do not know how to do it. I spent roughly half of my years as a developer fixing other developer's problems. They didn't see past "the input worked" and/or "the numbers added up".

This isn't (I imagine) much different than if we are talking about medicine or engineering, etc.. The novice will have a difficult time because the subjects are hard. We've all been there but we overcame the initial difficulties (and this was before there were YouTube videos) and we've advanced to solving new difficulties. Hard things don't magically vanish one day.

 

Click what exactly? The Lightmap which is a set of textures? How would that know what mesh is associated with it?

And where did you suggest this feedback?

 

They can highlight a mesh if you click the mesh object in the scene view. Wouldn't need rocket science to reverse that.

Customer service team, forum, etc. Pretty sure @AcidArrow also have requested it several times.

Keep in mind, this is one of many bad UX situations also.

 

Im struggling to see why you need this? Just because you need something, doesnt mean its useful for everyone. Thats really one of the core balancing acts of UX design. What you are suggesting would be "bloat" for me.

I am sure the team have actually qualified UX designers, rather than people just throwing suggestions out into the void on the forums - that said if you really do have a good suggestion I recommend actually contacting unity instead of assuming your comment on a forum is going to be read or acted on Also - making a request doesnt mean "its a good request and definitely will get acted on" either. Your requests likely were evaluated and deemed not a good addition to the engine, for reasons such as the above.

 

We can read out of this comment that your are not making a actual game, large at that ,that uses lightmapping.

Like I said, I have given feedback directly to unity about it. And its not the only feature. Though maybe the one that is directly connected to UI UX. The others are more workflow related.

 

When looking at the lightmap through the baked lightmap tab in light mapping, the lightmap UVs are overlayed. I don’t think it’s an unsolved problem being able to click on the overlayed UVs and have it return the related mesh (other software can do it) and surely at the very least you can check the spot you clicked on against the bounding boxes of each UV.

The use case is when you check the baked lightmap view to see how your layout looks (as you do when you care about lightmap efficiency) and you notice something weird (like distorted UVs or something), feels like it would be pretty useful if you could click and instantly get which mesh has the funky UVs, as opposed to the current method of leaving the baked lightmap view open and going through each mesh in the hierarchy until the relevant UVs get highlighted (because they do, if you select a mesh in hierarchy).

I believe there were multiple people that asked for this feature when the reverse feature was introduced (UVs getting highlighted, when selecting scene hierarchy meshes).

This isn’t the thread, but here’s a random one I found because I ran out of energy to spend towards Unity forum related bullshit: https://forum.unity.com/threads/please-let-us-click-a-mesh-in-the-lightmap-preview.1029766/

Just because you’re struggling to see the usefulness, doesn’t mean it’s not useful. Get over yourself. And if Unity had to make sure every feature they implemented was useful to everyone, we’d no longer have new features.

Also the light mapping team has been swamped with getting the Lightmapper to work for years and a whole bunch of suggestions were disregarded because of “architectural issues”, I don’t see any point in making feature requests until they are in any shape to actually implement new features.

 

Also there is a second use for it, you can easily identify meshes that have little light variation and can be lowered in texel resulution.

 

Groovy, thanks for the info and context! I haven't baked a lightmap in Unity in years (due to *reasons*) so am out of the loop with the workflow.

 

Hold on a second.... You can select a mesh object in Unity in the scene view???!

 

Yeah, but i want the reverse I click in the UV space and it highlights the corresponding mesh in sceneview

 

Honestly, your feedback request is going to have a significantly higher chance of being considered if:
- You are talking directly with R&D engineers and Product Managers and it aligns with their roadmap and doesn't require a ton of work re-building an entire feature.
- You join Unity yourself and get wheels turning for it to be solved.
- You join Unity yourself and write the code yourself and shepherd it into trunk.
- Make a third party plugin/tool that does the thing and then either use it yourself or get acquired by Unity to distribute/integrate it.
- You have a higher level of paid support package so more direct communication with Unity people who can do the thing.
- Someone at Unity is making a project internally that 100% requires it to ship something.

Customer service team and forums is a very very indirect way of actually suggesting feedback and it getting 'though the funnel' into an actionable task for a release at some point. Not saying it won't be actioned as sometimes things are picked up that way; its just significantly less chance of the suitable eyes on it and it to be placed in a higher priority than 'nice to have'.

 

I'm not quite clear on this... are you considering yourself a "non-technical" user?

In any case, to what end do you think your suggested solutions would be useful for Unity, their existing community, or those "non-technical" users? Will they help us ship? (Some things people have suggested certainly would.)

Do you think a "non-technical" person who can't use Unity as it is will somehow be finishing and releasing stuff if only the UX is nicer? I think there are far bigger hurdles.

I agree that it'd be great for Unity to do what's described, and I've written similar stuff before. It's not hard. Check all objects in scene (who cares if it's slow?), see if they use the selected texture, if so then see if they have a tri which overlaps the selected point.

It's ages since I've lightmapped anything, too, but I remember a fair bit of troubleshooting when we did, including making a "tool" to select the map an object was on so we could hand-tweak stuff in polish stages.

 

Another UX disaster, the alloc graph show allocation. But you manually need to scroll over the threads in the profiler to find it. Wouldnt it be better if you could hint from the allocation view which thread is allocating

 

What a disaster, having to scroll.

 

How long has this been the case? Because I can think of things that have been mentioned for ages repeatedly that never saw any attention.

 

I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. While we certainly have a better idea of what's being considered in the first place, you can look at my registration date and see that I've been here for a good long while. My issue is that what gets considered in the first place seems to be based more off internal decisions than community feedback. I've harped on this before, but there were things that were on the old Unity Feedback site that were there for years, often with the highest votes without getting addressed even a little bit.

To pull out an example, one of the top voted things on Unity Feedback was a much needed overhaul of the terrain system so that it could properly support things like proper overhangs and caves, even proper sculpting tools like those that were in CryEngine 2. This suggestion was made in 2009 and the best Unity has manage since then is an extremely lacking hole painting system. There's also stuff like how people wanted smooth alpha values for masks as an option in UGUI, something that still has to be implemented manually.

I suppose my question is the same as it has been many times on this forum: what assurances does this new system have that even frequent, vocal requests will get any attention paid to them when there is historical precedent to the contrary?

 

Honestly those are huge things to undertake and best case you get something slightly better than what's available in the asset store (since there is good stuff) :/
I'd rather Unity keeps working on the core components which are irreplaceable by the user like the rendering pipelines, DOTS and so on.

 

I would argue terrain is pretty "Core".

I would also argue Unity needs to have excellent and easy to use tools and features instead of chasing "core" technologies like DOTS that only a few people are going to use and letting everything else become S***.

 

I would say that 14 years is plenty of time to overhaul a system that is core to the development of a lot of games. Especially considering DOTS, the SRP, and so on were all started well after that.

 

For us 99 percent of performance problems are in the rendering stack. Our game logic is tightly optimized. For us better performance in Terrain, GI etc is way more important than a few percent better game loop performance

 

I highly doubt this type of opaque suggestion dump will net any progress towards many of the community's pain points.

I've submitted some suggestions for Unity Visual Scripting via this process 2.5 years ago. They're still doing their own thing without any communication about how/if common issues with the tool's architecture will be addressed.

To be fair, some of those suggestion/feature requests have appeared under consideration but I wonder if it's the result of this suggestion process or it's because at the time the newly formed UVS team was communicating in Bolt discord server and all of those suggestions were discussed with the team many a time.

Nearly 3 years later, UVS team has gone radio silent on Bolt (now UVS) Discord and nothing has been clarified on how/if the architectural problems of current UVS will be addressed. They're doing their own thing internally and per November 2022 update will continue to do so for the next 2-3 years until UVS 2.0 drops.

Unity have gone full corporate and they seem to mainly consider corporate feedback they get internally or from sizable studios which have the resources to develop workarounds for common Unity problems indies come across daily. And Unity programmers hanging out on the forums means little, when product managers are not here and control the direction. Or if they sometimes pop up on the forums - they can't talk about anything and there's no ETA.

 

Hey @angrypenguin didn't get a chance to reply to your comment. I appreciate the distinctions you're bringing up. UX isn't just how something looks but more the language and flows of how the product (Unity in this case) uses.

We may be speaking about 2 different but connected things: 1. Improving the existing features (that can be their functionality and UX, which lots of folks here have brought up several examples). 2. Improving it's overall UX patterns and language so the entire platform is more predictable, consistent, and easier to pick up.

As any business, Unity has to think of new customer acquisition (all of us in this forum will die and they'll need new bodies to pay) and staying competitive. A metric we UX people talk about is "adoption time". Like how long does it take a new user to be 'hooked' onto an app or digital service, this can be defined by frequency of use, using certain features, repetition, in use etc. For Unity a better metric may be time to proficiency. How long does it take a new person until they've achieved certain proficiency in Unity that will keep them hooked on a product (this 'certain proficiency' would have to be defined by product teams). But intuitively for Unity that time to proficiency will be very looooong. How likely is that someone will say "f--- this, let me try something else...is there an easier way...do I even have to be doing this at all" As more folks are jumping on trendy topics like the "Metaverse" and AR/VR/XR platforms (I'll include myself there) Unity actually has a captive audience of potentially new creators. Who will face the massive hurdles of even creating the most basic things in Unity because it's has such a steep learning curve? That said, Unity is an industry standard, so many folks "have" to learn it [my guess is that Unity invests more on staying a standard than making it necessarily easier]

To give you an example of disruption: when I started in UX about 9 years ago, we were using Illustrator and InDesign to make wireframes and hi-fidelty mockups. Some folks were using Photoshop. Then there was Omnigraffle to make wireframes, and Axure to make clickable prototypes. Then came Sketch to shake everything up, everyone was using Sketch it became the industry standard in a couple of years. Then came Figma, that allowed you to do your designs on the web or natively on an app (it's all webgl behind the scenes), and that became the industry standard. All of this shake up happen in the span of 8 to 9 years. Without mentioning all fo the competitors to those platforms

@angrypenguin you're right that improving the UX only, will not by itself help non-techincal folks ship more stuff. But it get folks more interested, lowers the barrier to entry and provide a more friendly ramp to proficiency and adoption. Especially important now that there's a captive audience. Unity is the company that's at the right time and right place at the moment for that.

 

I think that all of those apps have a fairly simple and easily identifiable set of design goals, thus making UX prototyping an area ripe with competition and relatively easy improvements to UX. For example, all of those platforms are targeting a flat screen on web or mobile.

Unity is inherently way more complex in what it does, the platforms it targets and the performance studios require for things developed on each platform. Not even mentioning the different devices it's targeting with AR/VR and all of those requirements. VR rendering requires rendering everything twice, once for each eye. The UI in that game may be in the game scene or on top as a flat UI. This same VR game may require post-processing effects that may or may not include the UI. All of that needs to be doable, and able to be turned on/off and tweaked, which is just layers of complexity not found in typical mobile business apps.

I appreciate what you are saying though, it's definitely not an easy path to learn Unity and to make something. I think the Unity editor is more familiar to people that start learning it with previous expertise using 3D animation software. People who are used to designing UX in all the tools you describe will be very unhappy designing UI interfaces in Unity, partly because of it's legacy of constantly changing UI frameworks, but also for reasons mentioned above - it just needs to target so many different use cases.

In the end, there are much fewer competitors in this area and each competitor targets a specific market. Unreal is arguable much easier to learn, but is biased towards producing realism and walk-through environments. Gamemaker is much easier to make a simple game, but not as robust or able to target as many devices as Unity. Unity is definitely the swiss army knife, the one with a fork and spoon and everything else attached. Not exactly pretty or easy to hold in your hand, but it can do a lot. Not sure how one would go about making it elegant and easily accessible for everyone!

 

Excellent points @Voronoi. And the analogy of a Swiss army knife is a good one. Also I appreciate your examples on the complexity of Unity handling different platforms.

Tying it with your observations on the evolution of UX tools. The UX market disruption was specifically due to those new companies narrowing down the focus and going deeper with specific functionality. Illustrator could (and still can) do many of the things Sketch and Figma does, but Illustrator does sooooo much more (and to be fair, Illustrator was not designed with interfaces in mind). Sketch and Figma narrowed their focus on flat-ish interface design only, making developer hand-off easier than their predecessors, and allowing for quick prototyping in the tool itself, among other things. I'll disagree with you that their goals are narrow and easily identifiable to begin with. Those companies actually chose to strategically make them so. To give a counter example, you have tools like Webflow which tie the design and development process into one. That's a different strategic approach to solving a similar problems (building 2D sites for the web). Not surprisingly Webflow is more complex (but solves a different side of the equation, you don't need a developer to build and deploy your designs). Another example was Adobe Flash, back in the day. You could do almost all of the web design process in one place. Design, animate, build and deploy all within one tool (its UX was far from simple).

Unity, like you mentioned has strategically chosen to cover a lot of platforms. And to be able to do some 3D modeling, 2D Ui design and building and deployment all within one tool. So yes it's expected to be more complex, especially compared to 2D. The 3D medium itself and its possibilities with interactivity, is just has more stuff one can do. So it's expected that a tool for it will be more complex. But Unity has chosen to be all things to all people (I'm assuming because of business reasons, cover more ground try to get more users). And yes it's tough for the established players to be the disruptors. Too much legacy, and you don't want to change things too drastically for your paying users.

We are seeing the beginnings of disruption in the 3D modeling space. Where the focus is simplification of functionality, and with it, interface also. Simplifying specially the material, modeling and rendering. Great examples are Vectary, Bezel, Spline, Womp (one of my favorites, highly recommend it, you can make fun-looking things very quickly). Also ShapesXR for Oculus, and probably many others I don't know about. Granted these tools are not targeting the profesional, precision 3D or VFX artist (it's a different market and arguably different use cases) But it's a start to a different approach to making 3D. And as far as I know, none of the came from the big established players in 3D (Autodesk, Adobe, Rhino, Blender, etc). I wonder if the same will happen in the 3D interactivity and composition space.

 

Hey @MartinTilo thanks for sharing this. What do UX Engineers do at Unity? I've actually never worked with any myself. I can only take guesses at what they do.

Also thank you for sharing about the public roadmaps, had no idea those existed. It's massive and it paints a good picture the diversity of things Unity is involved with. Will definitely check those out.

 

I didn't say it wouldn't help, I asked if you thought it would. As far as I can tell, my other questions went unanswered.

I'm fully aware of the difference between UI and UX, and of the practical implications of the shotgunning of concepts on display there. What I'm interested in is practical, actionable suggestions which can be evaluated. High level examples of how a fundamentally different set of tools was disrupted is nice in a biz dev meeting, but I'm here to ship software.

Unity's audience where this stuff matters isn't as captive as you're suggesting. If I'm working for someone who's making me use Unity then I'm most likely a member of a team, with some establishment which will assist with Unity's rough edges, because that's what software developers do*. If I'm picking it up out of personal interest then there are plenty of competitors, with either higher or lower technical experience requirements.

None of that is to say the UX can't be improved in meaningful or useful ways. So, putting aside hand-wavy ideas about "disruption", I'm genuinely interested to hear some concrete, practical ideas about how that can be done for both newcomers and experienced software developers, without limiting flexibility.

As an aside, when it comes to "disruption", Unity already does/did plenty of that. Check out how games were made pre-Unity - raw software dev or 6 figure license fees were typical. As an example, Unreal's sudden increase in license accessibility since v4 can very much be seen as a response to Unity doing things differently.

* There are definitely things that annoy us or get in our way. But based on the examples given, they'd only fall under UX in the broadest sense. And we're often modifying or building on top of the pre-existing tools, so we don't want them coming with too many built-in assumptions.

 

there isn't actually any feedback here though (not from OP I mean).

it reads like a weird hail mary job pitch. Why not fill out an application like everybody else?

Unity is supposed to be pretty extensible. Could write some plugins or something to modify the UI yourself and show examples?

Or is it just ideas guy?

 

Unity has no interest in the OP's suggested remedy: making Unity easier to learn and use.

They have the exact opposite vested interest, thanks to the subscription model's "virtues" -> making it appear potent and easy to use and learn : whilst actually being a time sink.

So the OP's mistake is simply not understanding the business model.

Unfortunately, it seems Unity have internally come afoul of their own model, hence the rate of development of DOTS, SRP, Terrain, Lightmapping, UI, Animation, Input, Audio etc.

 

Being hard to use doesn't work in their favor, if you get things done quicker you quicker get to a state where it's unlikely you would switch over to another engine.

Having tools that work for you rather than against you can never be a bad thing.