Why Microsoft turned Office into a Game.
slideshare.net
slideshare.net
This would seem to extend beyond turning your interface into a 'game'... maybe it means that we should be much more focused on providing meaningful feedback. When a user does something wrong, translate that into an action, comment, or something that clearly provides an opportunity for learning. Makes sense...
Interestingly, I've experimented with something like that in one of our products. Instead of trying to provide the shortest path to complete an action, I designed the interface to take the user through the same steps they'll use when actually managing the stuff they create (with lots of helpful prompting). This isn't necessarily new, but it was new for me. The early returns have been pretty good with this approach.
One thing I might take a stab at changing: Instead of providing immediate prompts for the user, let them click around and only display the prompts after enough (failure) time has elapsed....
Maybe it's similar to users having more satisfaction from bugs fixed in a later version than there never being bugs in the first place.
The very clear error messages in Java made it more game-like, and were unusual at the time (compared with eg. C memory management problems). The Java development team apparently played nintendo games to study what made them fun to use. Though out of fashion these days, it wasn't always the case. The popular scripting languages of today often have a REPL, which is more game-like. Do they have other game-like qualities?
I agree that designing the architecture to be easy to explore and learn is a great idea, to me it seems that the best application to a help interact was if one added the option to play with things before the instructions for how to do them. Not if one removed the instructions entirely.
You don't want to be doing something, and then be distracted by the help screen and come back to the initial thing an hour later forgetting what it was you wanted to do.
Sometimes less engaging functionality has a greater capacity to engage.
This is a great presentation - thanks for posting.
Apparently, it was designed to teach the hjkl keys. It's likely a few other vim games already exist (vim has every feature you can imagine, and then some). After I've played some video games, Vim actually feels like a video game to me.
Except for its learning cliff. However, when I put together regular expressions, I use new features by trial and error at first, and this is quite like a game. Try it, press u, edit and try again, press u. That's a feedback loop, as in the game; just turn-based instead of real-time. lisp/python/ruby/bash etc REPLs are similar.
I'm curious how well this type of thing would do in a corporate environment, especially those switching from Office 2003 or earlier to 2010. I can see how this would be much more helpful than the standard training classes I've seen.
Since Office on the Mac sucks and has subtle compatibility issues whenever I share files with PC users, I am considering giving the web app a try as my new "have to use MS Office" escape hatch.
I would argue it's primarily because the iPhone feels like a game when you play it. It rewards you for doing the right thing. It provides a lot of feedback. It's smooth and quick... It's exactly what the author is talking about.
The iPhone has been around for several years, but it seems there have been no such growth in it. Each app is self-contained, and is explicitly forbidden from becoming a new center.
1. Undo. Who is ever going to discover this on their own? Every action you can perform on your iPhone (With the exceptions of volume adjustment, going to the home screen, and locking the screen) is done by interacting with the screen. The undo gesture is not only hard to discover by accident, but it's very context-sensitive, which means if you do it by accident, it may not do anything at all. This is basically the complete opposite of discoverability. His 'skill atoms' example should demonstrate why this is problematic - if you want the user to develop a skill on their own, it should be easy for them to discover the verb to trigger the action (press a button, tap an interesting thing) and easy to understand the results.
2. The home button. While it's convenient and useful, in many cases I would find that an application would discard my changes if I hit home to dismiss it, instead of saving them. The most common case where I ran into this was the alarm application: I'd create a new alarm, go into the subview to set up the alarm, and then hit home to dismiss it instead of hitting the little back button they shoved in the corner... and it would throw out my new alarm. While the home button is a good affordance, it is destructive - by using it incorrectly, the end-user may or may not lose work, which makes them wary of experimenting. (It's my understanding that Android has a similar issue, but I've yet to use an Android phone).
I could also harp on how the lack of multitasking increases the penalty for end-user mistakes, but people have already beaten that dead horse.
Just to be fair, here's a similar example from the Palm Pre:
In most Pre applications, to delete an object, you simply pop up the dialog to edit it, and hit a trashcan icon. Simple. However... in a few specific cases, somebody on their UX team decided it would be brilliant to require the use of a gesture to delete. There are zero on-screen cues to suggest that it's possible to perform this gesture, or that the gesture will do anything - so the uninitiated user will simply think 'how do I delete this?' and get frustrated (or, hopefully, look it up on Google). In these specific cases, you have to drag to the left or the right on top of the object you wish to delete, which magically reveals a hidden pair of buttons under the object: Delete and Cancel. Only then can you delete. Even worse, it's possible to botch the gesture - if you don't drag far enough, the phone ignores your gesture. Compared to the majority of the Pre's UI (which is light on punishment and encourages exploration), this is a huge design failure.
Call me paranoid, but it feels like Microsoft doesn't really like Mac users. Kind of odd since Office is a important franchise unto itself, but now maybe they have caught on. Another example of one business silo hurting another.
The presenter is Daniel Cook (Danc) who worked for Epic Megagames long ago doing game art and design.
Some of his essays have made it to HN before, those and some of his art can be found at his site: http://www.lostgarden.com/
The ribbon may be a happy happy joy joy thing for fluffy folks, but I just see a crappy toolbar with half a dozen fonts and no clear way to search for the randomly-distributed features. I detest it.