- Do video games require a different UX approach
than websites and applications?
At our September virtual UX conference.
Dr. Jakob Nielsen shares his thoughts on the topic.
- In many ways, yes, but also in some ways, no.
So first of all, video games are another user interface
and therefore they were designing them as user interfaces
and there's a context to use
and sometimes they're collaborative and so forth.
So there's a lot of things
that I actually somewhat similar to what we'll do.
There's one thing that is a humongous difference,
which is that video games in some sense had no real purpose
other than being fun and enjoyable to play,
but they're not achieving anything.
Whereas basically all traditional user interfaces
have some, some external goal,
I mean, external to the application external to the website.
Now you're gonna buy something
and those shoes are gonna show up
on your doorstep a few days later.
Or you're processing the payroll for the company
or whatever it is,
but there's something that needs to be achieved.
And for video game, there's nothing really to be achieved.
If you think about it, a lot of these video games
are kind of fighting oriented in various ways.
And if you think about it, you would want to have
the most efficient time of fighting,
would be like one big button that says,
kill all the enemies.
You just press this button, boom, and they're all gone.
That would be a very, very efficient user interface, right?
And it would be a very boring game.
And so in that sense, there are different requirements.
But if you go back to the active definition
of we have like the five usability quality attributes,
which are easy to learn,
efficient to use once you've learned it,
memorables, you can return to it after absence,
low error rate and satisfaction.
If those all also apply to video games,
the satisfaction becomes a much more important one.
Whereas for many, let's say very work oriented tools.
You still want happy employees.
So you want to know satisfied users,
but maybe efficiency is most important
if you're paying for these people's time.
For video games, you know,
it's really the, the satisfaction that's all important,
but you still have to have learnability,
I mean, it's not enjoyable, if you go into a game
and you have no idea how to make anything work,
and it's just not learnable.
Efficiency is maybe a little bit
of a different criteria said you don't want that ultimate
efficiency of click one button, they all die,
but still you wanna be able to like when you're moving
around and stuff, you want those operations to be efficient
anyway, you certainly want it to be memorable
cause you're playing the game one day.
Maybe this weeks go by and then you go and play the game.
You don't wanna have to learn it over again.
And it's very annoying with arrows, I mean,
you sort of like, you, you, you think that, I don't know,
like you switched from one weapon to the other,
whatever it is and what you didn't,
or you, you think you're on this part of the game,
but you're in that part of the game.
So all those feedback mechanisms apply just as much.
And certainly in terms of methodology,
there's a lot of methodologies that are quite similar
actually so in, in the, in the games industry,
they could play testing rather than user testing
or usability testing.
But you have people play the game,
you have people play an early version of the game
and you watch them play
and you see, you know, how it happens.
One of the differences,
there also is often these games are quite long experiences.
So to get, can take, you know, 40 hours, 80 hours
to play through a game, and so of course,
for traditional user interfaces,
it can also take a long time.
I mean, how many hours have you spent on a word processor
on your career?
Right, I mean, that's a lot, but in terms of the studying,
we tend to study briefer sessions and in game play,
they actually do have to get gamers in
and they sit them down
and kind of a little in the lab and they just play
and play and play for for days.
So that's, that's, there are some differences there, right?
But I think ultimately it's, it's a user interface.
It's a user experience.
The same general methodologies apply.
The goals are somewhat different, but that said,
it's has a lot of similarities.
A lot of things
that actually we in, in traditional user interface design
can learn from games design
in terms of well, more enjoyable,
but also in terms of like better feedback
for let's say three-dimensional environments
or other of these more advanced user interfaces
that often are somewhat clunky to use
for work purposes,
and so they're more easy to use for game purposes,
because if they were not easy to use,
the game actually would be boring.
And you don't wanna pay attention
to the mechanics of operating the game,
you wanna be immersed in the games world.
And that's kind of one of the criteria we have also.
I always say about a website sites
that you go to the website for purpose
to get the information, to buy something maybe
not to figure out how to operate the website.
And that's exactly the same for a video game.