Intro to UX Design - User Experience and You - Extra Credits

In the beginning, there were only the words "press start." User interface has come a long way since then, and with that added complexity, new roles have emerged in the game industry. So, let's take a look at the role of a user experience designer and how they are changing how games are made. Also, special thanks to Jamie Lukins for helping us write this. Jamie's a UX designer at Bungie who has worked at Disney and Zombie and who was one of James's first students. Also, sorry my voice sounds a little weird. I'm sick. I I Sorry. Before user experience roles, the job of designing the user interface often fell into the hands of the game designer or an artist. And to put this delicately, some designers and artists were up to the task. Many were not. For a moment, imagine that you are a clothing designer. You understand how to make new and interesting clothes for different body types and different styles, but in order to sell your clothes, you have to design the store they're sold in. Do you

organize your clothes by style, season, size? Where should the mannequins go? How about the cash registers, the dressing rooms? Oh man, I wasn't trained for this. Help! Help! I mean, maybe you're good at designing store layouts. Maybe you aren't. My point is, your skills as a clothing designer may not be mutually exclusive to your ability to design a store, but they certainly don't help any. And all the time you spend calling contractors and picking hangers is precious time that you're not spending designing clothes to go in that store. In the world of games, game designers design the clothes. User experience designers design the store where the player can access the clothes. User experience or UX designers design how game systems are taught to and interacted with by players. They find a way to show the player all the options they have without making the experience overwhelming. When a UX designer is doing their job right, the player should always know what is going on in the game and know what they need to do to do better. So, how do UX designers go about their job? Well, they need to know three things before they can get started.

Number one, they must know who the game's audience is. Number two, they must completely understand the game's design themselves. And number three, they must know what platforms the game is being built for and what technical limitations they can expect as a result. UX designers are masters of taking all these different variables and finding the best way to make the game designers ideas accessible to that game's audience. You can think of UX like translators. They take the designer's concept and translate it into player speak. They have to learn the game and understand it completely. Visualize how every tiny part of the design will be presented to the player, pitch that presentation to the team to get approval, and then direct artists, sound designers, and programmers to implement that presentation. Over the course of this process, UX designers are going to have to interact with every game dev discipline there is. And that means they need to be able to speak the language and understand the goals and limitations of every aspect of game development. All while also remembering the most

important group of people for their job, the players. Ultimately, the area where players and games meet is the world of the UX designer. And the type of players each game attracts will be different. You wouldn't design the user experience for a Smash Bros. game the same way you would for a Mortal Kombat game. You have to know your audience. This is the UX designer's job. You are the player's advocate, perhaps more than anybody else. It's easy for both artists and programmers to get lost in their own worlds of art and design, but it's your job to always steer the team back toward how the players are actually going to understand and play the game you're building. You can even use your skills as a UX designer to help communicate these problems to other members of the team more effectively. All you need to do is think of them as your audience. Think about the situation from their perspective. What might help them understand where you're coming from, and what might motivate them to act on that problem? I mean, that's a skill that's going to come in handy pretty much anywhere in life. UX designers will rarely generate new game systems, but it's their responsibility to work with

the game design team when a system or a series of mechanics is getting too complex for an average player to understand. Sometimes a design might not seem very intimidating on paper, but the moment you try to lay out a menu for the player, it turns into a frightening wall of buttons and text. You don't want that. And I'm going to tell you right now, one of the toughest moments you'll have as a UX designer is that moment where you can't find a way to simplify that wall of buttons and text. And because it's your job to present complex information in an easy-to-understand way, the only option is to go back to the designers and ask them to change their design to something that can be more clearly presented. It's really hard to do because going to those people and telling them to go back to the drawing board just because you can't find a good way to present their current design really feels like admitting defeat. But ultimately, the fact is that no matter how good a UX designer is, some game systems just inherently require too much of the player, or at least the kind of player that game is targeting. This is just how it is with game design sometimes. Game designers are tasked

with packing as much play into a game as they can, and good UX designers can empower them to do that. But sometimes that means bringing their ideas back to Earth in the interest of making a good game that ships on time. Not like antagonistically or anything. You're all on the same team here. It's just part of the design process. But that's just one of many challenges. UX designers also have to be very aware of the technical limitations of the game engine they're working in and the platforms they're designing for. For example, if you are making a mobile game, how big should you make the buttons so that people can easily tap them with their fingers? How big should those buttons be if the player has to click them with a mouse pointer in a PC game? And remember, if it's a mobile game, you also have to factor in that your button size and placement might cause the player's hands to obscure their view of the screen. You've got to keep all those platform-specific factors in mind. Finally, your UI design needs to look good and match the style of the game. Done right, the user interface can enhance the feel of the game and help create a greater sense of immersion. The

best user experience design is one that players don't notice. One that so seamlessly becomes an extension of the players' desires that they feel like there's nothing between them and the gameplay. Like, for example, take the humble drop shadow. It's the silliest idea, but it sneaks in almost unnoticed and serves a vital gameplay function. So, okay, story time. Back when we started making 3D platformers, we found that there was this huge problem. When players jumped, they couldn't tell where they were going to land. Judging depth perception and distance isn't easy on a 2D screen, especially when you're looking down from above, the way you often are when jumping. And missing a jump that you thought you were going to make is incredibly frustrating. So, devs tried all sorts of things to solve this. But then someone came up with the most ingenious UX design, the drop shadow. The drop shadow is just that little pool of shadow that shows up directly below your character whenever you're jumping or moving. In most games, it's literally just a circle of darkness that has nothing to do with how real shadows

actually work. In fact, I think we even sometimes refer to it as a blob shadow now. But despite the blob shadow not actually being a verisimilitude of shadow, it gives players an anchor, a way to judge distance, and perhaps just as importantly, an anchor that they didn't even have to consciously recognize to find useful. If you A/B test a game with this feature on and off, you will often find two radically different reactions. Turn it off and players will say that the jumps are difficult or that the controls are imprecise. Turn it on, and assuming the rest of the game is designed well, players will say that the jumps are engaging. And when you ask them how they knew how to handle those jumps, often they will just say, "They just knew." That is what a good piece of UX should do. It should be inexpensive and not distract from the rest of the game, but almost subliminally make the game better for the player. As game developers, we're getting better and better at making games, but now, rather than stumbling into creating good user experiences on accident, we're starting to build a vocabulary and a growing

group of passionate UX designers who are developing this new field. I for one cannot wait to see how games improve into the future. See you next time.