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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.

Michal Malewicz
UX Collective
Published in
9 min readDec 13, 2020

UI trends for 2077
How far in the future are 2077 UI’s and how far can they be?

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.

2077 Cyberpunk website UI

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.

CRT monitor with late 90’s website layout
This is how most websites looked back in 1997.

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.

Cyberpunk 2077 Toggles

Toggle much?

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

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Responses (7)

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Fun article! I'm surprised you didn't make a reference to the Braindances. Seeing them be able to replay a scene and break down the auditory notes or scan the environment would be a huge leap of technology advancement. Honestly scary feature to…

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Hi Michal,
Thanks for sharing your UI ideas and thoughts in reacting to Cyberpunk 2077. I found it very unique and interesting:)!
If you don’t mind, may I ask if I can translate it into Chinese so I can share this case study with my peer designers…

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