User Interface Design

[zenolalia]

I've been watching a lot of UI and UX design guides lately, because it's always fascinating to me to see how very tiny tweaks make very large differences in experience.

My favourite one is an analysis of the UI of the composition software Muse Score, which is fascinatingly inconsistent. Users of open-source software will recognize exactly the sort of bizarre, piss poor yet weirdly functional UI design immediately. Parts of it are spectacularly put together for the tasks in question, such as navigation and certain forms of input, which allow rapid, intuitive use that doesn't interupt flow and saves time. And yet, inconsistent glyphs, empty sidebars, and checklists that close after each click make it teeth-grindingly painful in some places.

But, the one that I think I would recommend to a general audience is this video about how the UX in popular video games is functionally alien, acting like a foreign language to people who don't play games regularly. It's much less technical, but it's also just so intriguing. Things like KB+M games not mentioning that the mouse controls your camera angle, because it's just assumed that everyone knows that, leading players to stare straight ahead for long period of time. Not knowing how to use on-screen maps or waymarks. Plus, the sense of peculiar disappointment from realizing that an open world game nonetheless has a highly scripted or railroaded path that doesn't allow for the solution you came up with to a certain problem.

Comments

[leahandillyana]

"Plus, the sense of peculiar disappointment from realizing that an open world game nonetheless has a highly scripted or railroaded path that doesn't allow for the solution you came up with to a certain problem." That's the reason why don't play anything but visual novels nowadays, I constantly come to the point that I cannot try what I wanted to try and the intended solution in a game is something I haven't thought of, and often a non intuitive solution.

[feotakahari]

I wonder what you’d make of Pillars of Eternity. It likes to give you situations where you can use one of multiple skills or items, like “climb the cliff with your grappling hook” or “climb the cliff with your high Athletics skill” or “use your Perception to find an alternate path up the cliff.” The DLC starts adding in spell-based options, so you can do stuff like put out a fire with a water spell.

[palominocorn]

Pillars of Eternity has solutions other than "kill everyone"? (Tongue in cheek! I am actually decent at playing POE without acting like the greatest murderhobo to ever murderhobo!)

[zenolalia]

That sounds fascinating! I'm not an especially creative/puzzle solving type of player, so I doubt I would come up with anything cool, and yet... I kind of want to try! Extremely complex puzzle systems like that are very interesting!

[feotakahari]

Oh, it’s not complex to solve per se. It just gives you a list to click on, based on the stats you have and the items you’ve collected. It can be incredibly funny, though. (Protip: you can do glorious things with a high Resolve.)

[stardust_rifle]

I really like long rants about things I'm not interested in. Thanks!

[palominocorn]

I've been playing video games since the last millennium, but I didn't pick up a console controller or try a first-person RPG until my early twenties. And boy was it... a complete and utter disaster. To make matters worse, the people watching me had been console-gaming since they were in diapers (more or less) and were indignant that I wasn't picking stuff up immediately. It's a testament to the game (Dragon's Dogma, but mostly it's nifty character creator) that I kept playing and put in the effort to learn things instead of beating someone to death with the controller.

[zenolalia]

I had a console before I had a computer, to the extent that when I tried playing keyboard and mouse games for the first time, I just... Couldn't! Walking with buttons and not the analog stick?? How do you turn! Camera control with the mouse?!

It took literally years before I found a pc game engaging enough to actually use the keyboard and mouse instead of hooking up a USB controller. The sheer amount of buttons, the complexity!

Which is really interesting, because like, I had been touch typing for years. I knew where all the buttons were. But I just could NOT figure it out!

[palominocorn]

Yeah, I can imagine it takes getting used to. When I started PC gaming, I did so with isometric games - only two dimensions to worry about and everything except the pause button (and cheat console, no one said I was Lawful Good) was with the mouse, which makes things waaaaay easier (or at least, it did for little seven-year-old me, who'd already figured out the mouse and keyboard in order to look up cute pictures of ponies and read fanfiction online).

I just Cannot with plugging a controller into the computer: I have to sit pretty close to the screen to see (because I refuse to wear glasses at the computer) and there's just no ergonomic way to fit the computer AND my elbows on the desk. Mouse + keyboard means I can just use my regular set-up. (What game was it that finally made you switch away from the controller, BTW?)

[zenolalia]

I switched to keyboard and mouse for Final Fantasy 14 just earlier this year. It has controller support, and quite robust support to. Most controller players don't fare any worse than KBM players. But, I hated the way the hotbars looked with the controller, and I couldn't get vibration support to work properly (this ended up being a flaw in Win10 not the game itself). Since there's a lot of chat in the guild I'm in, I went ahead and bit the bullet.

I probably never would have changed if it weren't for the chat thing. I even used a controller to play overwatch, which has absolutely terrible controller support and actively punishes you for using controllers on PC.