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Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

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Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#11

Post by vvanders »

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.

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#12

Post by asiachick »

runawaybottle wrote: post #6

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…

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

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#13

Post by throaway46546 »

antiterra wrote: post #2

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…

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

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#14

Post by username90 »

thrower123 wrote: post #8
noahtallen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resu…

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.

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#15

Post by ComputerGuru »

antiterra wrote: post #2

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…

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

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#16

Post by hoyd »

antiterra wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#18

Post by astrange »

thrower123 wrote: post #4

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.

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

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#19

Post by zubspace »

throaway46546 wrote: post #13
antiterra wrote: post #2

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…

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

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#20

Post by shash7 »

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.

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