Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

jenson.org

Having worked in both domains on the technical side one thing they share in common is no one really knows what makes something "fun" or makes UI/UX "intuitive". There's no sure-fire formula and the most successful approaches I've seen require extensive experimentation and iteration.

To take that further the most successful teams weren't the "smartest" or the "hardest working" but ones that had the fastest iteration loop. It drives everything else about the process, relentlessly optimize that loop and it was like a superpower that enabled teams to take more chances at whatever difficult thing they were trying to solve.

Totally agree - the definition of done is really hard in creative work. Having a culture of refinement with the courage to ship early and often is a powerful tool to hone in on great results

Usually, it means good tools.

I don't work in the video game industry personally but tooling that allows for these fast iterations seems to be a common theme among success stories.

And if you look at the composition of a large game dev team, sometimes, tooling makes the largest part. I mean for programmers, not artists, obviously.

That said, one of the killer features of the tactical fps game Valorant is the sound you hear when defeating another player. It’s incredibly pleasant and satisfying in a way I haven’t experienced before, to where it feels a bit like a psychological conditioning reward. Despite being a somewhat similar noise, the effect is the polar opposite of the Windows string hit.

If done in quick succession it builds to a little sting at the fifth kill and if that wins the round, an announcer declares “ACE!” in a way that players clearly find extremely gratifying.

I’m not sure how to pull this off in an app. People have certainly tried, but, as an example, the ‘woosh’ noise when sending an email in Outlook isn’t something I look forward to.

However, I think I’d file this under ‘great UX inspires great UX,’ as there are plenty of games with bad or frustrating UX.

Also, is it a common thing now to call any complex branching hierarchy ‘fractal’?

Jeff Goldblum visited a game developer for his eponymous TV show. Even as a musician, he was surprised and enchanted by the idea of an "audio reward".

It's not just about the sound but the timing. Valorants sounds hit at precisely the most satisfying moment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfu_WZ6p51U

This reminds me of Unreal Tournament '99. Would be cool if there were announcer sounds in Outlook, if you send many mails in a short timeframe like this:

https://youtu.be/C3_ToT14lt0

Nothing beats Unreal Tournament announcer! In UT2004 it goes even further and you can even configure it with different voices!

https://youtu.be/UPIxHddkNgc

https://youtu.be/pJeSwlmhoPw

Apple pulled it off with the audio notification for Apple Pay payment complete sound. Reminiscent of The Good Place.

I always enjoyed the sound notification from logging into the chat client Pidgin on Linux years ago. There was something comfortable with those three notes, in an echo.

Battlefield 1 has a rather excellent one as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2QxpSoYF18

I think one good example of "good UX" is Id Software's Doom 4, a game that has a phenomenal UI and great placement of relevant info. Weapon status is tracked adjacent to the crosshair, while cooldowns and health bars were relegated to the corners of the screen. If you played that game's campaign, you're probably well familiar with how dang good that HUD is.

Then we get to Doom Eternal, the sequel to Doom 4. Doom Eternal is a really fun game, but it's UI is a direct downgrade from it's predecessor. If you don't believe me, I suggest you compare them yourself: the difference is quite staggering. Gone are the easy-to-read colors from Doom 4, now replaced by strange and ugly gradients that waste too much brainpower to read and contribute to digital noise. The cleaner UI layout has also been desecrated, swapping the cooldowns to appear next to the crosshair and putting weapon stats in the corner... what??? I will never fully understand how any of this game's UI passed QA or sold as many copies as it did when it looks this ugly.

That being said, Doom 4 and Eternal are both fantastic games, and you can pick them up for pretty cheap these days. It runs on relatively low end hardware (any dgpu should work) and even runs on Linux!

No mention of Halo 2 I see. Halo 2 had an amazing UI/UX for forming multiplayer parties, keeping the party together across multiple games, managing the party members, and keeping the party together while the 'leader' managed which matchmaking playlist the party was in. It took a long time, but it seems like most modern multiplayer games have come around to doing things Bungie's way; It's a shame it took so long. A lot of games suffered not for gameplay but for game setup.

Making my own list for fun:

1. Z-targeting in Ocarina of time, brilliant.

2. A bubble that eventually explodes limiting how long you can block in Smash Bros (clear visual indicator).

3. All of Destiny’s in-game menus.

4. WoW’s action bar/frame UI has yet to be dethroned.

Horrible UIs:

1. Eve

2. Those old Morrowind games

3. Crusader Kings

4. If anyone wants to see what a Windows operating system inspired UI in a game looks like, please download Black Desert Online.

I found Destiny's in-game menus to be horrible. I played for probably a month before realizing there were more options behind right clicks or other invisible UX

Dota 2 is an incredible and vastly underrated experience of having a godlike UX.

Problems:

- Fast paced game, both keyboard and mouse are heavily used, with over 60 apm usually - Incredibly team based game. It is a team sport, even if you're good, if the rest of your team is bad, you will lose. - Players can't talk using the chat, usually. Because of the high apm requirement.

Solutions:

- Press alt. Almost every button will show a tooltip, flip the display to show alternative information or show extraneous information. Eg: "Flips the icons in the minimap to show hero icon instead of team based flag, shows neutral creep boxes, tower ranges", etc. - Hold alt and click anywhere. A chat based notification will be send as team chat. Eg:"I have 200gold, I need 300gold for Guardian Greaves, Gather for Smoke", etc. - Hold the Y key. A chatwheel will show up for quick chat replies. Eg: "Get back, Push", etc.

There is so much to learn from Dota's UX. Heck, even if complex webapps implemented the Alt flip feature, that would make a huge difference.

Are you talking only about the UI? I can't really comment on that since I haven't played Dota enough. But in terms of clarity, other MOBAs (HOTS, LoL) are miles ahead. Just a few examples of what I mean:

- Little portraits show which hero is which in the mini map

- You get a loud and obvious ding and visual effect when you get turret aggro

- This is subjective but the Art direction is way better. In Dota it's often very difficult to discern the players from the background.

The last point is extremely important. I tried DotA for a while after playing a lot of LoL and had the same content, but it's not just discerning characters against the background that's difficult, but even distinguishing one character from another. Not that it's hard to tell them apart when looking at them, but in LoL characters are so distinct in how they move and in their shapes that even with tons of skins that you aren't even familiar with you can tell out of the corner of your eye which character just appeared on screen, while looking at something else.

I'm convinced this is part of how world of warcraft distinguishe[d|s] itself: characters aren't just cartooney, they're distinct. Zones feel entirely unique because of the appearance at any point.

Dota 2 also has the best sound design of any game I've played. You can close your eyes and still roughly understand what's going on.

Persona 5 and derivatives has some of the slickest UX I have seen in any interactive media.

Video games are notorious for shitty UX. Notably when you've got a title that was designed for consoles and hastily ported to PC, or sometimes vice versa.

Maybe true for the last part, but I don’t think notorious is the right word. Nearly everything about a video game is UX — design and software coming together. Video games are immensely popular, and most people have several games that they love or enjoy. I would posit that you can’t really enjoy a video game if it has terrible UX, because that would mean you can’t interact and engage with it as a video game.

As a result, I would say that most popular video games actually have very good UX, relatively speaking. Games like Overwatch have optimized around combat, games like Valheim have optimized around a really cool environment. A game like Minecraft has really nailed the UX of building and crafting for a lot of people.

Skyrim has sold millions and millions and millions of copies with an inventory system that is downright painful, and essentially requires third-party mods to fix. It's not an isolated example.

But a majority of popular video games has great UI/UX in a majority of areas. You cherry picked one rpg with horrible inventory system, most rpg has great inventory system which is why Skyrim sticks out. And aside from inventory the other parts of Skyrim works really well.

What I notice about video games is that they don't use any system UI[1], have to pay artists to make everything, don't respect accessibility settings etc, and yet video game studios exist in many more countries than other successful consumer software companies, and they're basically the only kind of software people actually like using enough to emulate.

[1] well, I wrote a Pong game once that used standard controls as sprites and just moved them around the window

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