How video games inspire great UX (2019)

I found games ux really transformative , where they almost become work UIs. Everyone pays to learn photoshop, nobody wants to pay to learn to use an UI for a game. Not even in tutorial ttime.

Total annhilation was such a milestone to RTS games UI. Programming unit routes and behaviour via factories was peak intuitiv design. It was such a boost to the experience of strategy compared to the clicks per minute juggling competition that was starcraft.

I didn't read the entire article but the headline reminds me of a programme I use: Treesheets. It's a spreadsheet/note taking app made by a person in the games industry, and I find it really fun to use.

link: https://strlen.com/treesheets/

Refreshing take on exploring the "delight" aspect of UX with lots of nuance as well. I read too many comments on here that seem a little a too spartan in their perspective on good UX, but it feels silly to be spartan on a topic that is so, so far from being solved.

When I traveled to Japan I realized that many of their vending machine interfaces are totally in the style of literally any Nintendo game UI I ever played: a bit cute, a bit whimsical, but ultimately very easy to read and fun to use.

But the biggest differentiator in my eyes was sound. Where in Europe most non-broken vending machines are silent apart from the noise they make when the product comes out, in Japan every action, every button, and every step produces a host of sounds, often the machine literally talks to you.

Of course machines with sounds exist here as well, but it is often "just" a layer that has been added to improve accessible with no considerations given to the quality and aesthetics of the sounds. The Japanese machines I interacted with all had their very own consistent character.

Great article. I’ve been in the UI/UX space for years. Prior to that I studied gamedesign at uni and graduated engineer in art and tech. Principles of gamedesign always allowed me to solve ux problems in sometimes unusually delightful ways. One tiiiny example was a search function for a piece of software that was incredibly slow. The engineers couldnt get it to go any faster. I helped solve it with an old gamedesign technique, which is to add story to the loading screen. Just adding a fun animation and text on what’s happening helped decrease dropoff and increase delight. Now transitioned to more design and engineering allows me to own the full ux even more. [1]

[1] https://designshippers.com

One difference between games and apps is the way of development and release. A game is build and then released to the community in one go, so everyone is assumed to be a learner.

Games are explicitly tested by new testers all the time to identify learning bottlenecks. App features are build for existing customers where the assumption is they already know how to use it, testing with new users seems to be rare.

There will never be a time when I'm configuring my UI in a rendered page or on my desktop on Linux or BSD that I'm not thinking about the pre-CU UI and sounds of Star Wars Galaxies or mostly Japanese PSX / PS2 video games of a certain design style of the time.

Many games would cease to be games, had they a good UX to solve the nominal problem. E. g. many management games would be way easier with a spreadsheet.