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Borderlands EchoVision Live
Studio
Genvid Entertainment
Type
Interactive Streaming • Web
Client/Partner
Gearbox Software
Role
UX/UI • Motion
The Challenge
Designing the blueprint for interactive entertainment
Borderlands EchoVision Live marked the first exploration into a new type of entertainment experience: a live, interactive choose-your-own-adventure series where audiences could influence the direction of the story as it unfolded.
Unlike traditional games or passive streaming content, the experience needed to combine cinematic storytelling, audience participation, gameplay-inspired interactions, and live decision-making into a format with no established UX patterns.
The challenge was creating an experience that felt intuitive to viewers while introducing a completely new way to engage with a beloved franchise. And it had to be distinctively Borderlands. Claptrap would have been so proud!
My Role
Defining interaction patterns for a new medium
I collaborated with product, narrative, art, and production teams to establish the foundational UX patterns using the classic visual Borderlands style, and porting it for the web. These concepts would later evolve across SILENT HILL: Ascension and DC Heroes United products.
My role focused on audience interactions, choice systems, interfaces, visual language, and animation that allowed viewers to participate in the story while preserving the pacing and immersion of a cinematic experience.
Design Approach
Making audience participation feel natural
The experience required a careful balance between storytelling and interaction. Choices needed to feel meaningful without interrupting the narrative flow, and interfaces needed to guide participation without pulling audiences away from the world.
We explored interaction models that made decision-making accessible to viewers while establishing a framework that could scale across future interactive storytelling experiences.
Collaboration
Building a new format from the ground up
Because this was an emerging category of entertainment, every discipline in my skill set contributed to defining the experience. I worked heavily with engineering to translate creative ambitions into doable interactive systems that could function reliably in a live environment.
For example: All animation for Borderlands Echovision Live was created specifically with the browser in mind with Lottie and Framer Motion. To support various technical and animation needs we extended Lottie with our own custom library to solve for unique issues like live text/localization, animation states and state machines, dynamic variables, and optimization.
Every animation on this page was prototyped and tested in the browser.
Impact
Establishing the foundation for future interactive experiences
Borderlands EchoVision Live served as an early exploration of interactive streaming entertainment, establishing foundational UX patterns for audience participation, live decision-making, and narrative interaction.
The project demonstrated how game design principles and narratives could be adapted for a broader audience, helping establish a new approach to storytelling that combined the engagement of games with the accessibility of streaming entertainment.
TEAM CREDITS
UX/UI Direction
James Lipscomb
UI/Visual Design
Matt Webster • Todd Colby • Randy Hyunh
UX Design
Carlene Bruton • Sophie Shao • Melissa Kay
UX/UI Production
Tien Nguyen
Concept Art
Kaoklai Thepchinda
Motion
Matt Webster