Nancy Drew: The Case of the Redesign

My Thinkful bootcamp capstone. Most people played it safe. I chose a video game — specifically, a beloved point-and-click adventure series whose latest entry had alienated its fanbase with a redesigned interface.

The brief was a UI mod for Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem. The real challenge was honoring twenty years of established mental models while modernizing the experience and improving accessibility for players with limited mobility or low vision. Four weeks. 287 survey responses. Two rounds of usability testing. One prototype that made a tester say she’d fallen in love with the series all over again.