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UI Trends 2077
UI trends for 2077
From touch through VR, AR, all the way to direct neural connections. See the future of User Interfaces.

As a designer, when playing a video game that has user interfaces inside of it, I can’t help but to think about how they’re made and how they fit the lore and time of the game. So whenever a game has a computer in it, that you can interact with, I sit down and play around with it.
Hello, 2077!
Cyberpunk 2077 has inspired me to take a look at the interfaces in the year 2077, and what I think would be the directions UI’s will take. But before we start going theoretical, here’s a super brief analysis of the in-game UI’s. There’s more but I want to focus on just two elements here.

The 2077 internet
Apparently, the internet in 2077 is a homage to the late ’90s. I remember making my first website back in 1998 and the websites seen on computers in Cyberpunk are following the exact same design patterns. That means navigation that was made to fit a 640x480 px, CRT 4:3 display.

Nearly all websites from that era had a horizontal, very visual header spanning all the way across. Then below they rocked horizontal, full-width navigation, leaving the rest of the space for the content. Mostly one-column.
So I was surprised to see the exact same thing in 2077 on displays that were definitely a lot wider. I’m not going to mention the uneven spacing, and an overall sloppy look of these websites, because it may actually be part of the lore as well.

Toggle much?
The other thing is that the in-game UI’s have some pretty obvious patterns put on their heads. Take a…