What UX designers can learn from 1990s Japanese video games
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> you come across a small, glowing light — something that’ll entice any gamer in search of loot
That small glowing light is not a UI element to highlight the tutorial – instead, it's what a 'save point' always looks like in that game. It just so happens that the first time you interact with a save point, you get a tutorial (the same as the first time you interact with several other game mechanics, which don't look like glowing lights.)
So that goes against the author's thesis a little bit - arguably they are misinterpreting the SNES UI in the context of their modern experience.
>Chrono Trigger is one of the few SNES RPGs I’ve played where poking around mundane rooms pays off.
Poking around mundane rooms in order to get rewards is almost a trope in SNES RPGs - Final Fantasy in particular was full of "secrets" you could find.
In fact, this reminds me of a criticism of game UI (Ernest Adams, maybe?) which is that its not obvious that you have to shoot crates in order to get health, or try to interact with not obviously interactive elements of the game world for hidden rewards. Experienced players quickly find these things by shooting everything and trying to interact with everything, because they are familiar with the trope from other games, but it makes the game less accessible to newcomers - arguably bad UX.
Different strokes. Some people just can't handle action games and get very frustrated at them, and prefer genres with no action at all that they can handle at their own pace. Others have to have their hand constantly held and can't be expected to figure anything out for themselves, but they're willing to dump hundreds or thousands of hours into multiplayer.
Consider the game of 'Go' - there's a very small amount of rules, and once you know those, you know all the rules, but there is still a lot of higher-level strategy to learn. It seems bad to not know all the rules, but good to have more strategy to discover...
It would obviously be disappointing to then be playing an opponent, and discover they are about to beat you with a rule that's new to you; or to have played the game for a long time and then realise there was a move you never knew you could make. Watch someone learn about capturing en passant in chess for the first time from their opponent, during a game they are invested in...
At the same time, learning a new 'strategy' is quite enjoyable and delightful - maybe even if you learn it as an opponent beats you with it – as long as it is something you could have reasonably discovered yourself, even if you didn't. (?)
A disappointed sensation like "oh, I never knew you could do that" is bad; but "oh wow, I never realised you could do that" is good.
What's the difference between these 'rules' you should know, and 'strategies' to discover? Is there a real difference? You are ultimately just choosing an action from a constrained set of candidate actions in both cases; in one case not knowing the full action set is bad, and another it's good.
Clearly, you can think of a game at multiple different valid levels of abstraction - 'you can push these controller buttons'; 'you can move up, down, left or right'; 'you can sneak up behind the enemy'; 'stealth is the best strategy' etc. Clearly, at some levels, not knowing all the actions is frustrating; whereas at other levels, discovering new higher-level actions is delightful.
So, which is shooting the crate to find a medkit?
It's not completely clear, but I can see how people would think it is a hidden rule, something they could not have been expected to realise themselves, but which was obvious to players of other games - a missing word, rather than a delightful high-level behaviour that falls out of the interaction language the game has taught them.
(Even further: in single player games, people often even intentionally handicap themselves. Either directly for the challenge, or because they are role-playing.)
Absolutely. I'd say Miyamoto was a master of this, rewarding players for playful exploration. One example of this is in Super Mario Bros, where you can break through to the top of the screen to where the score is. Not only did Miyamoto give the player the option to do so, as the player runs along at the top of the screen they may wonder how they're going to get down, but instead of punishing the earlier creativity you get rewarded again with warp pipes.
Simple design that teaches people how to use it through doing stuff rather than forced tutorials. Old school Mario games were great here, the level design basically taught you how to play the game without as much as a message box in sight.
Unfortunately, a lot of modern apps seem to be some overly confusing mess that try to rectify UX design issues by use of tutorials and pop ups and arrows and what not, rather than simplifying things so people can figure them out on their own.
in case you haven't enjoy the ride.
I mostly only mentioned old school because of my disappointment with Mario Galaxy 2 and the 'tutorial disc', which was one of the most pointless additions ever:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbDLuDRgnkM
Still, least it made for a funny parody:
It teaches you everything you need to know. It doesn't teach you about the run-button; and some people never found out about it. (And to the designers credit, you never need the run button in any part of the game to finish it.)
When options are hidden behind strange gestures, off-screen menus, and obscure icons, how are people ever suppose to find them without prior knowledge?
Todays GUIs are stuck in some uncandy valley, too much css, not enough value.
Better question, why not just stick with a GUI element that can be described succinctly? A gear perhaps.
In fact I'm writing this on Firefox, which has one of those things in the browser UI...
Similar to lots of other technical or jargon terms, it's not a good description for a (new) user.
I do feel that the swipe from the side menus are really unintuitive, and better left tethered to an on-screen (even if it scrolls off) button/icon in addition to swipe interaction, at least until it becomes very common.
A lot of the changes are because of size constrained devices, and a return to the concept that someone can only really see or think about a few things at a time. Then again, using OSX, Windows and Linux UIs on a regular bases, along with differences in apps that are cross platform, I may be too lenient of a judge here.
This clip from Secret of Evermore (same developers, different series) shows the ring menu system:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0aYoUGmW_q0
Also, slightly off-topic but I'm not sure the article it mentions about Minesweeper being designed to teach people how to use GUIs is accurate, though it could have been an unintended consequence. IIRC Minesweeper was written by a Microsoft intern, I'll try to find the Reddit thread where the author discussed the story behind its development.
It doesn't affect your point, but Secret of Evermore was actually very unusual in that was developed by an American team.
With the other point I raised, couldn't find something from the Minesweeper dev but did find something from the Solitaire dev. When asked about whether these games were included by Microsoft to help learn how to use Windows he said...
"A post hoc fallacy, I think."
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zfadv/til_t...
I like to imagine a world where Secret of Evermore did well, financially. It doesn't help that it followed in the footsteps of Chrono Trigger earlier in the year, Final Fantasy 6 the year before that, and then one more year for its spiritual predecessor, Secret of Mana. The bar was so high! Part of its lack of success, though, was a pretty broken combat system (unbalanced), and a poorly implemented "search here" command, which rendered the player needing to swing their weapon spastically when trying to find hidden items. A cool feature with poor UX really hurt that game.
Still, SoE had some really great art, and a decent story. What a great first entry into his professional career for Jeremy Soule (composer), as a teenager just out of high school. Who needs college when there's opportunities available like that? ;)
Design decisions for software should take the interface into consideration. That said, I do think ring menu systems can work on PC and mobile. Some mobile apps have a context menu triggered by a long press, I could see a ring-type menu working there. As for PC, I'm not aware of that many examples, but the pop up palette in Krita is one example that could be easily adapted to be closer to a SoM/SoE-style ring menu.
For example Eclipse manages to make the huge amount of bookkeeping in the game bearable with some very clever 'UI' on the player mats.
(https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/72125/eclipse)
Though for the really good designs you don't even notice the UI and bookkeeping any more.
For example: auctions are a tempting design choice when making a game, since they automatically balance the price of good and bad options available. But, they take comparatively long to resolve---so distract from the core of the game (unless it's specifically an auction game)
Instead some games introduce new options with a heavy mark-up and lower their price every turn. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction)