PS5 Game Base

Game Base is PS5's flagship social hub — the place where players manage their friends, parties, voice chat, messaging, screen sharing, and Share Play. On PS4, these features existed across multiple separate apps, each with its own navigation pattern and mental model. Players had to move between contexts just to manage a single social session.

PS5 was PlayStation's most significant platform launch in a decade. The social experience needed to feel native to the console — fast, unified, and deeply integrated into how players move through the system, not something they had to navigate away to find.

Designing a 10-foot UI for a living room social experience is fundamentally different from designing for mobile or desktop. Controller navigation, glanceability at distance, and the social context of shared screens all shape how information needs to be structured and revealed. The design had to feel effortless — players shouldn't have to think about where something is.

The opportunity was to take features that had been siloed across the PS4 experience — party, friends, messages, voice, screen share — and unify them into a single coherent destination. Game Base needed to become the place players would naturally return to for everything social, while also being accessible from anywhere in the system through the PS5 Control Center.

I led UX design for Game Base, working closely with product and engineering across a multi-year PS5 development cycle. The core design challenge was creating a unified information architecture that made all the social features feel like one product, not a collection of features grouped under a tab.

Key design decisions:

• Unified party, friends, and messaging into a single Game Base destination — eliminating the context switching that made PS4's social features feel fragmented
• Designed the Control Center integration so players could access voice chat, party management, and key social actions without ever leaving their game — a non-intrusive overlay experience tuned for the 10-foot distance
• Built around controller navigation constraints from the ground up — spatial layout, focus states, and hierarchy designed for D-pad and analog stick movement
• Collaborated with engineering to define the interaction model for voice chat and Share Play within the new system architecture
• Iterated through multiple rounds of usability testing with the PlayStation research team, refining the IA and flows in response to how players actually navigated the experience