From global entertainment interfaces to the adaptive learning concept Nori, Wang’s work explores how complex digital systems can remain clear, inclusive, and emotionally supportive.
As digital products become more capable, they also risk becoming harder to understand. A player reacting inside a fast multiplayer match, a child struggling with an educational challenge, and a gallery visitor encountering an AI-shaped image all face a version of the same question: can a digital system communicate what matters without overwhelming the person using it?
Zhiyong Wang has built his career around that question. A senior game UI/UX designer, 2D art director, educator, and digital artist, Wang has worked for more than 17 years in the game industry after beginning in graphic design and animation. His projects span internationally recognized entertainment properties, adaptive learning concepts, and digital artworks exhibited in Paris and New York. Across those settings, he treats interface design not as decoration, but as an architecture connecting narrative, behavior, feedback, and technical constraints.
That systems approach shaped his work on projects associated with Netflix Games and Niantic. For Squid Game: Unleashed, Wang helped define the interface art direction and translate gameplay concepts into player-centered flows, iconography, layouts, and motion. He says the project’s design system contained 158 reusable components, giving the development team a consistent framework for a game in which players must process rapidly changing information on a small screen. One matchmaking solution arranged 32 player avatars in a diamond composition and used the loading animation to complete the otherwise unbalanced 33-part pattern.
On Niantic’s Marvel World of Heroes, the challenge moved from multiplayer intensity to augmented reality layered onto the physical world. Early event concepts relied on detailed 3D scenes, but testing showed that the visual density increased cognitive load and slowed performance. Wang redesigned the map around simplified, color-coded event icons, revealing detail only after a player selected an event. He also led contrast and color experiments to improve outdoor readability under bright sunlight, an accessibility problem that ordinary indoor interface testing can overlook.
Wang’s conceptual project Nori brings the same thinking to education. Inspired by the emotional strain experienced by families navigating dyslexia, ADHD, and other neurodivergent learning needs, Nori replaces score-centered pressure with an altruistic learning loop. Children solve math, spelling, and science challenges to help animals across a narrative world. Animals then share stories, facts, and keepsakes, connecting progress to curiosity and care rather than only to ranking.
The project centers on a question Wang raised in a MUSE interview: “How do you design for the moments when a user fails?” Nori proposes what he describes as a soft landing. The system adapts its guidance and difficulty and uses supportive storytelling when a child struggles. Its technical concept combines Unity 6, Firebase, the Gemini language model API, OpenCV-based affective computing, and an AI-powered plush companion designed to continue personalized stories and quizzes away from the screen.
Image Credits: Project assets courtesy of Niantic, Marvel, Netflix, and Zhiyong Wang
Nori is a conceptual design, not a claim of clinical treatment. Its contribution lies in the interaction model it proposes: adaptive technology should consider the emotional meaning of difficulty, not simply optimize completion. The project received a 2026 MUSE Design Awards Gold honor in Conceptual Design — Gaming, AR & VR, along with recognition from the London Design Awards, NY Digital Awards, and Vega Digital Awards. The honors place its combination of inclusive education, narrative world-building, and emerging technology within a broader international design conversation.
Wang’s practice also extends into contemporary digital art. At Art Shopping’s April 2026 edition in Paris, his work Redrawing Time revived a motif from an early artwork through digital painting, layered textures, fluorescent color, and an unstable sense of perspective. The piece approaches time as material that can be sampled, reconstructed, and made visible again.
For Fractured Horizons: Imaging After Images, presented as part of NYCxDESIGN 2026, Wang exhibited Apocalypse, a digital UI/UX system for a gothic role-playing game. Its obsidian black, crimson, metallic textures, cathedral-like geometry, and skeletal forms turn interface architecture into narrative. In the exhibition context, the work suggests that buttons, frames, icons, and transitions are not neutral containers: they establish mood, direct attention, and define what actions appear possible.
Education forms another part of Wang’s contribution. He founded U Classroom in China to teach practice-based game UI/UX when specialized training in the field was limited, developing curricula from professional production workflows and mentoring 545 students. His online courses and public lectures reached tens of thousands of viewers, according to archived figures supplied by Wang, and his professional affiliations include IXDC.
Across commercial games, adaptive learning, digital art, and teaching, the common thread is a belief that digital systems should reveal their logic while respecting the person on the other side. As AI, spatial computing, and live digital platforms become more embedded in everyday life, Wang’s combination of systems rigor and empathy reflects a broader role for design: making technological complexity not only functional, but understandable and humane.
Photo courtesy of Zhiyong Wang
