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Where in the USA is this?

pudding.cool

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Re: Where in the USA is this?

#171

Post by TeMPOraL »

allannienhuis wrote: post #162
ethbr0 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From my experience, most people don't read the instructions or text notes anyway. This fascinated me ~90s computer gaming. There were clear camps of "people who always read the manual" and "people who never never read the manual."

for some, reading the manual was also fun. For most, reading the manual was an admission of failure.

Manuals in the 90s were sometimes actually fun. I still occasionally reminisce about that time in primary school, when one of the classmates bought (well, his parents did, I suppose) an original, boxed copy of StarCraft. He used to briefly lend the CD, and at some point copies of the CD started circulating, and he would just share the CD key with a few people - but in between, he lent me the manual.

I think I was the only one who really cared about it. I've had it for months, I think. Read it cover to cover more times than I could count. Pretty much memorized every bit of lore and trivia there was in it - and there was quite a lot. The manual itself was a small booklet, with a couple pages of backstory for each of the playable species, plus a lot of extra world-building details about individual units, buildings and planets. So even as I didn't have access to the game, my own imagination built a whole world and infinite stories out of what some would consider "filler content". But this filler content made me care, and eventually shell out my pocket money for Brood War, and later on, money from my first full-time job on the collector's edition of StarCraft II.

That SC manual came probably at the tail end of the era where the publishers put any kind of effort into manuals. Case in point: SC:BW came with just a tiny booklet with about equal split between lore/context, instructions for the new and changed game aspects, and legal/credits. SC II came... well, I don't know with, by that time Blizzard stopped caring about the game story anyway.

(Oh, and speaking of warm memories of computer manuals in the 90s, I have a special place in my heart for the big, heavy, couple hundred pages long manual to Word 6.0 (not 100% sure about the exact version), and earlier, for the interactive self-training application that came included with Windows 3.11 - that one taught me how to use the mouse!)

Re: Where in the USA is this?

#172

Post by timeon »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #150
bhaney wrote: post #60

The most interesting part of this to me is the UX feedback from the comments here. Many people, myself included, say they had no idea at first that the photos were all meant to be from the same location, even though the very first sentence of the instructions was "There are five photos from the same place." I'm pretty sure I read the instructions, I guess that just didn't register? An opportunity to reflect on how ha…

I do UX research for a complex simulation training device. We record and catalogue dozens of hours of video. You would be amazed how many users miss key information presented to them. You’d think you can plan and predict, but they always manage to find a new and surprising way to just not get stuff. UX testing on simplest grittiest prototypes yields the best results in my experience. The more work you put into it bef…

Lot of us do not read instructions. Especially if it is first thing presented.

Re: Where in the USA is this?

#174

Post by TeMPOraL »

actionfromafar wrote: post #135
tasuki wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting concept, but poorly communicated. It was communicated in the very first sentence of the instructions. It's just that both you and me failed to read the instructions. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

This feels like morality vs outcomes reasoning. “Morally”, no we don’t. (Me included.) Say, if you are a games designer and want to get the message across, then you can start A/B testing ways to get your point (pun mostly not intended) across more effectively.

One of the major ways this point is driven home in real life is through... letting the person fail in their task, suffer the consequences, and hopefully remember to read the goddamn manual the next time. Of course then there's a failure mode of e.g. bureaucracy, where people know everything is in the "manual" somewhere, they just don't trust themselves to understand it.

Re: Where in the USA is this?

#175

Post by timeon »

Nition wrote: post #107
jaywalk wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, completely missed the instructions as well. There's plenty of room on the page, they should at least show by default on the first visit.

> They should at least show by default on the first visit They did for me. Firefox browser on Windows 11. Instructions were showing when I first visited and I had to close them to continue.

First thing I one usually do on first visit of most pages is closing window to continue. So instead of reading the content I was searching for button to close it. Even though I knew it was not cookie pop-up!

Re: Where in the USA is this?

#176

Post by kylec »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #174
actionfromafar wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like morality vs outcomes reasoning. “Morally”, no we don’t. (Me included.) Say, if you are a games designer and want to get the message across, then you can start A/B testing ways to get your point (pun mostly not intended) across more effectively.

One of the major ways this point is driven home in real life is through... letting the person fail in their task, suffer the consequences, and hopefully remember to read the goddamn manual the next time. Of course then there's a failure mode of e.g. bureaucracy, where people know everything is in the "manual" somewhere, they just don't trust themselves to understand it.

In this case though it's "you failed! try again tomorrow!" (because it's a daily thing). The odds I'm gonna come back tomorrow are extremely low though.

Re: Where in the USA is this?

#177

Post by kylec »

actionfromafar wrote: post #135
tasuki wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting concept, but poorly communicated. It was communicated in the very first sentence of the instructions. It's just that both you and me failed to read the instructions. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

This feels like morality vs outcomes reasoning. “Morally”, no we don’t. (Me included.) Say, if you are a games designer and want to get the message across, then you can start A/B testing ways to get your point (pun mostly not intended) across more effectively.

I feel something like "OK, you made your first guess, now try to get even closer! Here's another image" would have been helpful.

Re: Where in the USA is this?

#178

Post by 8bitsrule »

Great geo-guessing, very intuitive, and today's chosen pictures have just the right amount of help. If I'd paid more attention to my intuition I wouldn't have tried Montana as a guess! When I did ... 171 miles.

"I'll be back!"

Re: Where in the USA is this?

#179

Post by TeMPOraL »

ethanbond wrote: post #140
tasuki wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting concept, but poorly communicated. It was communicated in the very first sentence of the instructions. It's just that both you and me failed to read the instructions. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

No, this is a design problem. The fact that so many missed it is just evidence of how subtly tricky good design is.

That's a kind of standard answer about manuals and design, and on the one hand I understand its practicality, but on the other hand, I'm starting to have doubts - this approach may be another cause of exacerbating the very problem it's trying to work around.

That is, the more stuff is usable without reading manuals, the more people ignore the manuals - making it harder to build complex, powerful tools, and in fact creating a strong design pressure to "fisher price" your product. Overall, this trend ends up disempowering users.

Re: Where in the USA is this?

#180

Post by sbierwagen »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #171
allannienhuis wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for some, reading the manual was also fun. For most, reading the manual was an admission of failure.

Manuals in the 90s were sometimes actually fun . I still occasionally reminisce about that time in primary school, when one of the classmates bought (well, his parents did, I suppose) an original, boxed copy of StarCraft. He used to briefly lend the CD, and at some point copies of the CD started circulating, and he would just share the CD key with a few people - but in between, he lent me the manual . I think I was t…

I fondly remember the manuals for Homeworld 1 and Homeworld Cataclysm. More than a hundred pages each, the second contains extensive in-universe descriptions of the units, talking about dispenser jamming issues in the minelayer corvettes and the odd center of gravity on the interceptor fighter due to its offset gun. Complete fluff, of course, with zero impact on gameplay. Perfect nerd bait, like those giant books of exploded diagrams of Star Wars ships that specified the wattage and manufacturer of each turbolaser battery on the Death Star. https://www.moddb.com/games/homeworld-cataclysm/downloads/ho...

More interesting in retrospect, the first manual contained extensive descriptions of kiith clans. They go on for dozens of pages, and don't show up in the game's actual story at all. Someone spent serious effort writing them. Why? Left over from an earlier version of the game pitch where the player would have to manage relations between competing groups on the mothership? https://sierrachest.com/gfx/games/Homeworld/box/manual.pdf

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