The Design of Everyday Games

[Music] hello folks apparently you can hear me thank you for being here I always remember going to see Jesse Schell at GDC that are at South by Southwest the first time South by Southwest try to do game design program and he said there are eight people in this room but I have a feeling they're the right eight people and I always remember that story because I really expected to see eight people in this room today to talk about user experience design and I think I might be looking between 80 and 800 I come to you with a perfect storm I blew a tire the mechanic was late 101 had an accident and now I have the wrong slides but I tell you what I will do my very best and you will ask me horrible hard questions which will make me weep and then I will give you free copies of my book to say thank you so I've got five copies of a book I

hope that will gave me some good will alright so here we are together and we're gonna talk about user experience design which is so odd for me because I have been doing user experience design for many many years when it was called HCI when it was called information architecture when it was called interaction design I've been doing it throughout all these name changes someday maybe you can explain to me by why UX people have to rebrand themselves every few years I'm not sure I fully understand that but what's really weird to me is that you guys are hiring these are experience designers now and when I was asked to come here and speak about user experience design I was kind of shocked because I always thought you were designing experiences right you're already okay well alright and then I started talking to people and I was sent a million screenshots which I would love to show you but I think you can imagine it you know The Witcher some Final Fantasy things like really horrifying menuing systems and heads-up

displays that you can't even read because they're sitting on top of the same colored designs I think that there's a lot of use that's forgotten in the idea of play so yeah you would not work wouldn't you yes well apparently the finger is mightier than the clicky okay so I teach now I'm an associate professor of interaction design at California College of the Arts I'm actually bringing the first game design courses to CCA and with a little bit of luck maybe even a minor it's very exciting to teach this stuff you know stone Lybrand stood on the stage last year and blew me away because he started talking about design and that design was bigger than game and he talked about Vitruvius Vitruvius was the very first designer of anything and he always talked about firm itas utility toss and Venu toss I never say it right but that

just means usability and durability and beauty so a thing has to actually you know if I sit on this table it shouldn't break I should know that I can sit upon it and maybe most importantly it should look good with which this table has lost it actually I wouldn't say that's most important possibly the most important is probably that it doesn't fall apart Don Norman who wrote the design of everyday things talked about the three stools and this to me sounds just like Vitruvius we're talking about feasible can we even build it we talk about desirable does anybody want us to build it I advise a lot of startups in the Silicon Valley and I will tell you that leg of the stool is the one that's most forgotten and then viable can we build it not go out of business doing it that is also often forgotten so this is Dawn himself and something really interesting happened when Apple first got popular so I don't

know are you familiar with the the idea of cargo cults cargo cults yes cargo cults in the South Pacific there are a bunch of Islanders and when the Americans were there they would drop cargo there and they would get food and when the Americans left at the end of World War two they built all these stick airplanes and all these pretend air ports with real runways and they thought if they made the gods happy and they built these icons to the gods the gods would bring cargo to them and when Apple very first launched their successful products like the iPod and then eventually the iPhone what did we see people started making white phones and people started making white everything you know apparently if you made things white the consumers would buy it and they put I in front of it there's the eye bud and the I bought and I this I bought is a vibrator by the way you know fun fact apparently if you look like Apple you can sell happiness in all sorts of interesting ways that's also

user experience design so this is what happens when my slides are wrong I'm just gonna make stuff up today so dawn is the fellow who actually coined the term user experience design and what he said was that user experience encompasses all all aspects of the users experience interaction for the company and so what we have now is a whole generation of user experience designer who think they're supposed to design the customer care and the marketing plan as well as the actual interface I think Amazon is a really good example of somebody who understands Dawn's vision for what user experience is actually supposed to be so if you look at Amazon it's one of the only places where I can get Tom Stoppard plays they're wonderful with the longtail right they're able to take care of all sorts of pleasure but they also know things about me with their recommendation systems which is fairly incredible you know the fact that Amazon knows me well enough to know Linda

Carter is very important to me is something I find very touching and increases my loyalty and of course it's all about the smiling boxes like nothing's better than coming home to a big smile right and then there's the customer service piece you know when the Kindle launched it had this lady that you could click on her face and suddenly somebody was talking to you and any problem could be answered instantly and this was a great way to start nibbling away at the Apple iPod iPad market so the first requirement is it has to meet the exact needs of the customer what are the exact needs of the customer well one thing I think Amazon does it's a little bit magical is the day I saw subscriptions now they could have just said people buy these things over and over again let's just get them to subscribe but in this particular case they actually predicted how often I would need to buy it I have no idea how often I need razors but they did and finally a joy to use this is the

stuff you guys get you understand perfectly this is the stuff these are experience people don't always get I find it fascinating than Google does doodles have you ever questioned this if you ever study brand you know there's one rule to brand it is do not mess with the mark you do not change the mark you do not resize the mark you do not add things to the mark and Google's like why let's just do whatever we feel as long as it's fun and it's interesting so they break a lot of rules amazon also breaks a lot of rules I'm sure you guys have seen some of these wonderful joke reviews common sense says let's get rid of these completely right this has got to be destroying our ability to do targeting this is undermining our brand we're trying to sell a bunch of different things but instead they let them live on and I think these are a really really wonderful way for the user to shape the interface connect to it believe in it and I think that from you know the years I've been going to DDC I think you guys often struggle with these

questions how much customization is the right customization what are the rules when can we allow these natural moments of excitement and interest to bubble up and I think this is a very brave approach for them as well here we have in order to achieve high quality user experience and a company's offering there must be a seamless merging of services of multiple disciplines I think this is one of the ones that is almost impossible for anybody to get right and for this one I'm going to look at Mini Cooper so I own a Mini Cooper if you own a Mini Cooper it's not just a car it's a way of living in the world it's a very beautiful thing everything - the beautiful round steering wheel - the fact that the the gas gauge is in the wrong place and by the way everybody mini-cooper runs out of gas the first time they on their first tank because the gas gauge is not where it's supposed to be it's somewhere in the middle but you don't care you forgive the car you move on you love it more it's a wonderful thing little moments like the

fact that the top doesn't just go down it can go half way down you know and your cat fits in it the other thing is that they really did a good job of making this into a real phenomenon they have the t-shirt they have the music you know this actually came out the same time that the iPod already put a thousand songs in your pocket they said let's put every song we possibly can but before your Spotify into your car so you can actually have any song that you could possibly want to listen to in the car they actually supported driving clubs and I think that not all of you know which game is going to be success but if you have a good sense that you're going to build something that's going to be wildly popular like Lego dimensions recently you know there's some brilliant work going on right there they have the community they have the toys they have the video everything feeds into everything which feeds into everything else and there's a completeness to that user experience I'm going to question whether a user experience designer could design the completeness of that user experience now Jesse James Garrett is

the guy who popularized the term Don Norman may have coined it but I think the reason we have user experience designer is this guy's recent and by the way I think this is the first GDC he's ever missed he's always sitting there in the back quiet and invisible if he knew how many people would be in this room I think he would have not skipped this year's it's a design of anything independent of medium or cross device with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as an explicit goal now I will tell you I was on the Twitter's last night and his business partner was saying game design is a subset of user experience design and I said I promise to say that to the audience and time how long they laugh at me I think that there is a really interesting question about what's the bigger and what's the smaller and what does it mean to design a complete experience however when he went ahead and modelled it out he kind of held it

down a little bit he actually designed the experience of use and I think this is the definition that is a lot more relevant to everybody in this room how do we design the experience abuse you were already designing the experience of play but play cannot be accessed without being able to use the interface the HUD everything else so when we took it take a look at his model we have you know everything from understanding users all the way up through visual design and information architecture again wrong slides apologizing for the size the font moving on with my life I think the three key parts of designing for the actual use our user interface information architecture and interaction design now I think 90% of you guys probably think that user experience is just user interface design and I read a really fascinating Cora answer by Raph Koster who I begged not to come today because

he said that user experiences mostly about designing an interface and I think that is a huge loss because we can't put lipstick on a pig and I don't think we should spend the time doing that so if we think about the entire user experience design from marketing all the way to customer service from the beginning to the end I think it's really in that circle where you guys are going to choose to hire your user experience designers so there are a lot of things that you should know that come out of the history of user experience design like I said it used to be called HCI I'm going to argue it's the exact same thing there are some universal principles that are built off cognitive psychology the design of everyday things talks about them Jeff Johnson's highly underrated Glee bloopers talks a lot about those psychological principles is talk designing with the mind in mind is available on the googles and it's very

good to watch but Alan Cooper who wrote the inmates are running the asylum said like putting an Armani suit on Attila the Hun we cannot good interface design only classes existing behavior which means if you don't have the behavior right you're just trying to make it look pretty so one of the key concepts is affordances and I think we see affordances all the time if you've read the design of everyday things you cannot walk through a door without complaining about it you want a handle to say pull you want a flat surface to say push my friend Erin Hoffman said Monument Valley is the most ux game she's ever played I'm gonna assume you've all played it if you haven't I'm so sorry it's a beautiful game it's tiny it doesn't you can actually play it to the end which I think most game designers have given up on but it is the most afford an in my life you know you've got these handles

that you can turn you've got buttons that can be pushed everything moves it's like when you're doing the beautiful direct manipulation of handling it with an iPod it's one of the most satisfying experiences ever because everything looks like it can be touched in an iPod everything can be touched and you don't have that Mouse intermediating for you which is very satisfying there was a huge fuss when flat came out so there was this big stylistic decision and by the way I think Apple is no longer a user experience company I think they're a fashion company because they gave up skeuomorphism which makes buttons that look Pusha below everything looked like you can touch it and made everything flat like a Mondrian it was almost like one day they said you know usability is out but flat is beautiful and let's go on to make everything pretty and as well as that they did it overnight and all of a sudden you couldn't see any of the icons everything looked different I have a wonderful video of a small child crying in the face of flat but beyond just no

I'm not kidding beyond flat being pretty and being elegant if it doesn't look Pusha belong a little tiny bit of 3d and the the buttons would read his buttons this is another interesting example so I have worked with AP testing for probably 15 years I was lucky I worked in search I worked in Zynga I worked at LinkedIn I put in a testing systems and I will tell you one of the most amazing things you can do is tell people what to do you will make all your numbers go up right now if you simply put a label on it says click here and if the button looks button a bowl and if the text looks like you can write in it it will change everything what I found fascinating and I haven't seen other people try this is if you take the hints out of the box and put it underneath the box you will increase data input I've tested this a B testing several times I haven't seen it they write it up but it makes sense right because if you have something fairly flat like this and you put the text in there it looks like a button or an

instruction that's been decorated so simply saying I am a form maybe put a blinking cursor in there it's in invitation it's an affordance meaning this is something I will say is always very confusing to me I feel like there's a lack of understanding of the historical learning that we have built into our interfaces so there's a wonderful expression from the book I don't remember the book but it is intuition is compressed experience and I think intuition is compressed experience is the number one thing to keep in mind when we are designing an interface that we wish to be intuitive what does it mean to be intuitive it means that we are using pre-existing interfaces and pre-existing metaphors so for example it's very simple you know we should know

what something loading looks like a gray link means it's not available a hot link means that it is available links make them colorful make them clickable this is a really really basic stuff and gets thrown out I've heard designers say well everybody knows just to run your mouse over and when it turns into a finger you can click it do we think we want our users trying to navigate by Braille that seems unpleasant to me set expectations meet expectations this is one of the most important things that I can think of when we're trying to do UX design so what's wonderful here is when we have a tweet you click it it'll actually give you a message Facebook as you know will show you a preview about

what you're actually going to send it will show it at the top of your stream what you may not know is when I went to put this behavior into the LinkedIn stream and get a designed it turned out we had to do a hack because if you have a lot of connections the top thing will not be your actual update but if people don't see their update at the top of the stream they will submit it over and over and over and over again so what we had to do is we had to force push the update you just shared at the top to avoid duplicate updates and otherwise we didn't have enough real-time opportunity to disambiguate the extra updates one of the things that I think alpha bear does really beautifully is you know spry foxes is they will give you an actual image of what it's going to look like on Facebook so one of the fascinating things that we learned when we I was working at LinkedIn is that people are terrified to share updates on LinkedIn and I thought that was really funny don't you want to promote yourself don't you want to become a big important person and it turns out that people are scared of social cost of sharing and

having worked at Zynga I will tell you that we interviewed a ton of people who would say we cannot we won't click on the shares anymore because my friends are yelling at me so knowing what the updates going to look like knowing how you can customize it making sure that people can take care of their social credibility is incredibly important to be effective so the feedback has to be set expectations meet expectations but also letting people shape their brand and their social circles I'm gonna skip this recognition over recall this is another good one so there's also been a lot of studies around the hamburger menu so the hamburger menu if I assume you're all familiar with it is that series of lines it turns out it's actually a low-performing tool the hamburger menu most people don't recognize that they don't know what to do with it and it's because it's the problem is recognition over recall people don't know what that looks like

yet I'm not sure when they're going to start figuring it out it still has very low up takes what turned out to be much more effective was simply the word menu now obviously there's localization problems with that but a combination of menu and then the hamburger and then perhaps over time you could reduce it allows you to get a significantly better click-through unfortunateiy is white like I said wrong duck how about carousels I noticed that more and more folks are starting to adopt carousels both on their front page where they're selling their games what's really fascinating about carousels is that nobody knows what those buttons mean you know those little dots like why would I click on the third dot none of those dots actually have any semantic meaning and so I was talking to PJ who works at Amazon and the merchants always wanted carousels they were really excited about using carousels in their design the problem was that they converted horribly there's a massive drop down from the first slide of the

second slide which means if you're on the second slide you're doomed and if you're on the third and fourth slide you're doomed er than doomed and therefore you go back to the problem of every fighting over wanting to be the first slide so you should use carousels except maybe you should so they asked themselves what if carousels worked which is like one of my favorite questions the world what would it look like if we could design a carousel that actually functioned correctly and it turned out that the secret was for Amazon get rid of the little dots recognition over recall and clear affordances so they just made instead of those little dots clear pictures of what was behind them and all the numbers went up so clear affordances recognition over recall use clear language this is another problem I see in game design people like the cute word they want to make all the navigation on brand let me tell you I have a be tested this for 20 years just be obvious be unsubtle be cute in the game don't be cute in the

menu system contextual principles so there was a wonderful talk given two years ago I think by the farm bill two folks are postmortem they talked about what they called creative pillars and they decided what was actually important to farmville so here we see if you were designing a restaurant site you know what really matters well a restaurant you know recipe should be scannable users should know where they are in the recipe you know have I am I at the place where things are boiling or am i that the place where things are burning and you should be able to find the ingredients that you can buy and what's really nice about this recipe is you can use the left hand side as a shopping list but then it also shows you where the ingredients are landing and the instructions this is actually how Julia Child does all the recipes so with farmville they came up with these creative principles that we're all about your farm should be alive it should always be in motion it should be growing it should be changing and those drove every design decision TiVo is also very

famous for their for their contextual principles and sadly TiVo was incredibly successful as a wonderful experience and then Comcast copied it was like an opposite cargo cult they copied all the functionality and then it none of the beauty but it seems to have hurt poor TiVo but it was very smart and they show the way so there are things you do as well so in order to be more effective you must observe in order to understand you need to analyze and then you need to create more things that you then you can test over and over again this is a quick sketch I do for my students I hope that you all do playtesting I'm very shocked if you don't I understand that there are game designers who don't do play testing at Zynga every Friday there'd be users there and if you didn't have something for the players to play your job was definitely questionable and on the line and I want to just remind people that when I was at saying that they were not dying and miserable they were healthy

and exciting and it was an interesting place to be and I think they were very smart since I left I can't really say what happened after that I swear it wasn't me I didn't break it on my way out but that rhythm of play testing is absolutely critical and what's fascinating to me is now teaching game design I see students building games and then it looks beautiful it looks like it's gonna work the rule sets perfect they test it and it dies it doesn't play well so it's the same thing with user experience we must test and test and test we must observe there's a ton of methodologies that you guys can pull on observation Yuma contextual inquiry is one of my favorites so as well there was a woman who worked on the very first farm bill that Zynga released and thank you and she always talked about the fact that it was a one handed game farmville and porn apparently are the two things that you consume one-handed for completely different reasons by the way so the reason you play farmville one-handed is because you have on your knee a baby and

you're playing possibly left-handed while you're bouncing the baby on your knee so if you did not know that you would build in crazy keyboard shortcuts a lot of complexity if you do not watch people there in their natural habitat you will not understand what's going on and I think Apple and Google Maps both don't realize that their music and their maps products are being made in the two seconds while you're driving because right now every time I try to play a song while I'm driving Apple tries to sell me a news or radio or something so think about context usability testing there should be a gimme I will tell you I play enough games to know that none of you are doing it finally analyze your information so I've got to say that this is a step that gets skipped all the time it's not done very well what if C people do is they go through their notes and they go okay we should fix these three things I think it's incredibly important to take every insight and put it on your post-it notes

and then rearrange them and rearrange them and rearrange them first try taking all those observations about how people live and how people play and do a classic affinity sort what how do things kind of hang together then try doing it by frequency how often do these things happen it by figuring out how often happens you know what you really have to fix what do you have to make better put it along a timeline what does it look like at the beginning of the gameplay what does it look throughout the gameplay what it looked like at the end of the gameplay it's classic Amy Joachim stuff right if any of you are old enough to remember her work about the players journey you know you want to design every piece of it so there are a lot of insights in the data and every time you rearrange it you see new findings and you discover new things we are in a very competitive business right now we have to find ways to be the best out there and it's worth the extra five minutes rearranging post-it notes to find a potential thing that might let you be successful finally make things make

things make things make things making make things you don't know what's true until you've made it so I a UX interaction design it all hangs together observe and understand your people be sure that you can't organize your content your menu systems need to make sense design the behavior you would like to see and communicate clearly user experience is really big that's why Peter thinks that play is within it but I think the very heart of user experience is actually really really really tiny just about the users experience follow the known principles finish with the user test during design everyone must care for the user so let's talk about it and I would like to give you as many books as I can because they're heavy so thank you thank you all

also read those books sir good-good fast move I was right there so when we start making games usually we start with like doing a rapid prototype of like the core mechanic and this kind of stuff but my understanding of making things on mobile and web would be that you start maybe you would like you know wireframes a paper prototype persona as user flows like this kind of thing do you think that the first steps we take to like building a game could be different and there's stuff that were skipping wireframes are a lie nobody should ever make wireframes stop making wireframes they're not good for anybody they're dreadful just no more sketch and then design if you don't need to make coloring books should you guys be making things differently it's really funny because when I talk about learning from game design to UX people I always talk about Bartles persona types an engagement style and I think it's really powerful the opposite for you guys would

be to think about the elements of personas that are always there so what other tools do they use what are they familiar with what's their visual vocabulary what are they technically savvy or they I worked on shockwave comm and when they were trying to redo it in the 90s they found out they had two kinds of people they had tough young skateboarder kids who loved making things blow up and grandmothers playing the crossword puzzles who would call customer service anytime anything was changed and when they figured out that they did choose what interface they actually made the interface harder to drive away the grandmothers which I think a lot of hardcore game designers are doing today so I think that taking something for personas is good don't do wireframes just make lots of paper things may paper things and play with them that's good so come up and get your book and I'll go to the other side yep but if you find me later I might have more I'm gonna have books I'm gonna have

books every day so you can find me later it could be questions hi the great talk by the way I have a question in terms of user experience and cross culture do you find yourself eating onion questions therefore questions find me later challenge is when you're actually featuring different cultures some of these principles are universal but I'm wondering if they actually vary depending on the culture or geographic location you're in I heard that you're looking for what changes by culture but is that just enough of the question that's not the question okay so yes everything changes by culture people have different dialogues that they use and I may have to put these up here because people want to grab them and I know you want one and I knew had to make sure they don't disappear so of course everything changes by culture we have different visual explanations the problem with the word menu is it doesn't change but we don't know do those lines mean anything we've always talked about gestural problems if you have a character in your game and they're going okay this means f offs in a lot of

different cultures so absolutely everything absolutely everything has cultural context this is my point about intuition there's no such thing as in born intuition intuition is compressed experience which means you have to examine the experience or else you cannot create an intuitive design okay thank you my pleasure yes I um what's your feeling on interfaces being becoming standard so in the normal app development things like the Apple tap bar is is a standard and and in material design that sort of set standards in games how does that sort of translate in the sense that there's some pretty crazy menus out there so things that are actually within a game world don't match I think everything is incredibly contextual so there I ran into Dan Cook in the hall and he said he was talking to a guy who was literally making games harder because they only want hardcore gamers and they don't want ordinary people playing their games I think there's an inherent classism built into

our interface decisions and that classism will reflect who real gamer and all those classical questions that are built into racism and sexism so I think that as gaming becomes ubiquitous we have to ask ourselves who are these people what language do they speak and who do we want to talk to you don't want to default into your audience who want to choose your audience and I believe that if you like money you'd like to have a rather large audience the other thing is that gamers are already incurred at a certain price point but you can move that price point around if you can get new audiences but that means you have to have the tolerance for onboarding them which is a huge problem I'll always remember the moment when my daughter was watching Nickelodeon and she said mama are you a gamer and I was like yeah she goes yay can I be a gamer too and I just you know that feeling so I think that it is all our moral imperative to think about how are we bringing more people into the games I hope they ask you any question yeah and also just games being being oh the

strange medium that they are and not a normal Apple the interface is pretty standard across voice why should your menuing system not be standard yeah there's no reason to be sexy in the menu you can be sexy in the game you know don't be sexy in the menu okay yes one more question oh well sorry my question I'll go to the wrap-up role and one question is about what do you think about testing interface before becoming a hundred percent inside of the game all you need is the level of fidelity so that your users understand it so the question is always going to be how do I make sure that people can actually play with it and the problem is that designers know too much so they'll recognize what some strange little symbol means and your users won't so you have to pretest it usually you want to find somebody else in a different part of the department HR accounting somebody like that do a quick test try to make it enough fidelity to become comprehendible but no more than

that because the longer you spend making things the more unwilling you are to change it I don't know if you've heard of the IKEA effect the IKEA effect says that the more effort we personally put into something the more we value it will over value it that's why I don't let my students code you know I want them to stay in paper because they're willing to rip things apart and toss it so don't think you okay we're off to the wrap-up room right it's uh that's perhaps you can follow me and he'll tell me where it is yes 20:22 will go to 2022 I will be carrying more piles of books around all GDC so feel free to accost me tomorrow I'll try to bring like 50 of them so please come find me