PROJECT 05 / EDITOR FRAMEWORKS
The chrome every Unity user touches
Owning the UX for the Editor's most-trafficked surfaces beyond the toolbar: overlays, editor tools, grids and dynamic panels, the chrome that frames every session for every creator.
- Role
- Senior Product Designer
- Where
- When
- 2024 to 2026
CONTEXT
The highest-traffic UI, with no single owner
The Editor's chrome, the overlays, editor tools, grids and panels that frame the scene view, is the UI every Unity user touches every session. It also accreted organically: pieces landed over years from different teams, and the result was a surface that worked but never felt designed as a whole.
The toolbar customization work I led was one piece of this. The rest of the chrome needed the same treatment: a real interaction model for docking, a consistent visual language for tools and icons, and a grids system that did not fight the people using it.
SCOPE, THREE SURFACES
Each surface is its own problem, and they all had to read as one Editor.
OVERLAYS
- Overlay menu redesign and PV feedback
- Docking and drop zones, reviewed with Motion and GTK
- Resizability affordances and pop-up differentiation
- Background color and toolbar filtering
EDITOR TOOLS
- Tool group collapse and reorder
- Group separation and context discoverability
- Iconography unified between Components and tool contexts
- Icon tracking and the icon pipeline
GRIDS & PANELS
- UX pass on the Grids system and a post-validation pass
- Dynamic panel collapse and spacer discussion
- Grid & Snap overlay
KEY DECISIONS
The calls that shaped the chrome, and what each one cost.
DOCKING AS A FIRST-CLASS INTERACTION
Tension
Docking was something users did by accident, not a designed gesture. The affordances for where a panel would land were inconsistent and easy to miss.
Decision
Designed the docking and drop-zone model explicitly, and ran the final design through Motion and GTK review so the interaction matched how the Editor actually renders and animates.
Tradeoff
It took cross-team cycles to align on the drop zones. The result is a docking interaction people can predict, which is the whole point of chrome.
ONE ICON LANGUAGE, EVERYWHERE
Tension
The same concept could appear with different icons in the Components view and the tool context, which taught users the icon was decoration rather than meaning.
Decision
Unified the iconography between Components and tool contexts, and put tracking in place so icons stay consistent as tools ship.
Tradeoff
Icon unification is slow, unglamorous work with no single hero moment. It is also the difference between a chrome that reads as one Editor and one that reads as many.
IN THE TOOL
OUTCOME
The overlay docking, grid and editor tool work shipped across Unity 6.3 and 6.4. The durable result is the same one that mattered on the toolbar: the chrome now has a stated interaction model and an owner, so the surface that frames every session stays coherent as the Editor grows.
Chrome is the least glamorous design work and the most consequential. It is the UI nobody notices when it is right, which is exactly how you know it is right.