I absolutely loathe 'modern' UX design, not only because it seems to get too out of the way most of the time, to the point where I am struggling to find out how to locate the damn interface to begin using it in the first place. I am the go-to tech guy in most friend/family circles as many of you are, and the 'hidden' modern UI interfaces become a compounded problem when I am trying to help people over the phone. Back in the day, when helping my family first use Chrome, I'd say "click the gear icon, in the top right" - and they would find it with near 100% accuracy. Now it doesn't matter what I say... "hamburger icon" (give me a break), "three stacked bars", "triple bars" - the settings menu is no longer iconic, and modern UX has become a verbal wasteland when trying to explain anything over the phone. "Hover over the little down triangle thing to the right, then the menu pops up" ... "swipe near the edge of your screen, not too far to the right though, just tap the very edge and the menu comes up" ... these kind of explanations should not need to exist if the UX was good. At least the old games you could walk your buddy through the selections over the phone.
To add to this, I find modern UI design hinders exploration and experimentation, which is typically how people learn to interact with new objects.
When options are hidden behind strange gestures, off-screen menus, and obscure icons, how are people ever suppose to find them without prior knowledge?
After going through DOS, WIN3x, WIN9x, AQUA, ... I'm very fond of the early 90s model. WIN3, IRIX. I had deep lispiness before leading me to seek fully metacircular UIs with code as interface and interface as code (lisp machines, self, ST, node based Houdini/Shake) but nowadays, with a little more abstraction power grown by the years I really like the tiny GUIs I listed above.
Todays GUIs are stuck in some uncandy valley, too much css, not enough value.
I first saw the term hamburger menu several months back and I thought, "huh?" as I had no idea what it meant. I had to go search the net to find out that they meant those three stacked bars. Why not just call it that? It doesn't really look like a hamburger.
I had to do the same when I first heard it, a sure sign that the metaphor fails, and most of the search results were pieces explaining what a terrible idea it is. Just searched again, yep, nearly all the first page is why you should never implement it, along with BK and a stack exchange "what's the lined menu icon called".
Better question, why not just stick with a GUI element that can be described succinctly? A gear perhaps.
I think it went sideways when developers abandoned the menu bar accross the top of the screen like all OS X apps have, and all windows apps used to have, but are now hidden from view). I think this was replaced by icons because translation into other languages was difficult with the tools of the time, and is difficult now because even with web technologies like Angular and PoEdit making the tools side of things easy you still need someone who understands the language to do the translation. So text translations got dumped for icons, and oftentimes the icons are terrible (like the hamburger menu which is just awful imo).
The hamburger menu icon is about as old as GUI based interfaces[1]. That said, it's about time and context... knowing and having the website's logo in the top left actually be a link to the homepage and getting people to understand that took a bit of time. Also, the phone icon is probably the worst example today... most people born after 1985 have never seen a phone that even resembles the common icon/glyph (I'm a bit older than that, but still).
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.
I know the article was talking about broad design cues, but there was one specific menu design from that era that I thought was fairly good, the ring menu system Secret of Mana.
This clip from Secret of Evermore (same developers, different series) shows the ring menu system:
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.
Thanks for the tip, that is unusual, I can think of one or two JRPG-style games made in the West, but no others for the SNES (though thinking about it, were there any Western developers involved in Earthbound or was that fully made in Japan?).
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...
I rather liked the ring menu system; one could go through the various menus quite quickly, (and with pleasant, contextually matched sound effects!) It's similar to the speed one can reach using keyboard shortcuts, but it could never be popular with pc or mobile since mouse / touch cant adopt it well, and those are the methods of input most catered to.
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? ;)
> "It's similar to the speed one can reach using keyboard shortcuts, but it could never be popular with pc or mobile since mouse / touch cant adopt it well, and those are the methods of input most catered to."
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.
This is crazy timing. I'm playing Chrono Trigger right now and the thing that struck me as fantastic UX this playthrough is that Crono shakes his head when you're trying to go somewhere you can't. I found it particularly useful when walking on the beams in the Arris Dome. It maps pretty well to the design pattern of shaking prompts when entering invalid input such as an incorrect password.
> 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.
In a game, finding out how mechanics work and what you can do is exploration. Figuring out that you can combine a certain action with a certain object to get a new result is exciting and interesting. When you got the whole game figured out, know how everything works and what to expect — isn't that the point where you abandon it?
That's half, the other is execution. Even if you know all of the tricks to a competitive game, you can always improve, just like with a sport.
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.
I think there's a difference between single player games, and competitive multiplayer here.
(Even further: in single player games, people often even intentionally handicap themselves. Either directly for the challenge, or because they are role-playing.)
> "In a game, finding out how mechanics work and what you can do is exploration. Figuring out that you can combine a certain action with a certain object to get a new result is exciting and interesting."
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.
Yep, saw that video. It's a good overview of how the level design in Super Mario 3D World works, and well worth watching for anyone interested in designing good games.
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:
There was a discussion about old school Mario on Hacker News a while back.
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.)
As an example of startlingly good UX in Japanese RPGs, I point to the modern persona games, which somehow manage the thankless feat of providing copious amounts of information, but always in a very useful way, as well as helping clear away the mundanities of the game (remembering enemy weakspots and such)
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)
Contrary to what the article says I think kids/people did read the instruction manuals back then. Some old games didn't have certain super moves mentioned in the game at all. That probably allowed UX design to be terrible in places.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 58.8 ms ] threadWhen 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.
[1] https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/
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.
http://youtu.be/jAJmPwe6IoU
> 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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rD5AskvHWc
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.)
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)