Classic Worms

However the iOS port has made a huge usability sin with its misuse of icons. Today I’ll look at what the problem is, and how it could be resolved.

Icons

Icons are visual pictures that act as a navigation or access point to software features. They are typically small pictures that represent an intuitive representation of the feature that they represent, for example a picture of a printer for the print function.

A good icon will be visually distinct and recognisable, yet have a close match to the function being represented.  It will also be uncluttered and make its function explicit.

(Interestingly, floppy disks are still used as the icon for saving, despite the fact that many computer users now will no longer be familiar with the original thing! As such, the icon no longer matches the function, and has become an abstract icon)

So, what’s wrong in Worms?

Icons are used in Worms when creating the map for multiplayer games. Here are the icons that are presented to the player upon starting a new game:

Worms Icons...

Let’s address each of these in turn.

Flying Saucer Thing – This controls the level’s theme, and matches what is displayed currently. However clicking it will take the level to the next theme (i.e. not the one pictured in the icon), which is counter-intuitive. This icon therefore doesn’t clearly indicate what it does without having to test it, which forces the player through some very slow loading times!

Question Mark – This changes the landmass, and is currently displaying as ‘random’. This is only obvious after clicking on it a few times however, each click signifying a different state of the landmass. Again, this leads to large loading times.

Arrows – This ‘refreshes’ the map, and gives a new random layout. This icon follows the standard for refresh, which is good, however makes no attempt to explain this functionality.

Mine – This controls the number of mines that are placed on the screen, and cycles between showing 0-3 mines. Like many of the other buttons, although the icon clearly refers to mines, it misleads the player by showing the current status, rather than what will happen when the button is clicked.

Coffee Cup – No idea what this does. If you click it, it cycles through showing 0-3 coffee cups, but I’m none the wiser what this refers too.

How can this be fixed?

It’s obvious in most of these cases that the icons are also functioning as status indications for the current map, which serves to confuse what the functionality behind clicking the button is!

As featured on UX Myths, Michael Zuschlag says that “icons contrary to intuition, do not necessarily help the user find a menu item better than a text label alone.  It’s not worth it.”

With these items in Worms, he’s definitely right. If these icons were replaced with text to indicate their function (such as ‘change theme’, ‘randomise level’), this would lessen the confusion caused by them functioning as status indicators otherwise.

I’d even suggest, if space wasn’t available for both, to just pick text – it’s less ambiguous, and can give a much more direct understanding of the functionality. Besides, a lot of the things being indicated in the icons (such as the level theme) is clearly visible in the level itself!

Related posts:

1. Usability Fail – Monkey Island 2
2. Usability Fail – Twitter on iPhone
3. Usability Fail – Lotus Notes

Kick Ass in action...

Today Erik tells us about his experiences with finding testers, getting user feedback, and why you should look at what people do, and not what they say!

First of all, I want you to bare in mind that I am in no way experienced in the field of creating computer games. I’m 18 years old, I have been programming for around 5 years, and most of that time I have been making websites. I have been successful in it, I’ve already had several jobs with some really large Swedish websites (where I’m from). The original kick ass was something that I started at 10 pm and was finished with a couple of days later. A couple of months after that I made a post on reddit where I linked to it. A week later it went viral and just exploded. Fast forward another few months and I begin with the iPhone app.

My idea of testing has always been to just write some code, try it out, if it works, great, if not, fix bugs. My twin brother, who is more the design monkey (if I’m the code monkey), has been the one talking about good UI vs bad UI. And we have worked together a lot, and now I also have a need for making good UIs. But the notion of a good UI is not something that I have scientifically proved to be one through user testing. It’s more what I can gather myself, so all my knowledge about UX is totally subjective. Some things are simple as daylight to see. If your mom does not know how to use your app you lost the market for +40 year olds.

Take that iTunes!

… And that is the way I make stuff. The idea of using “qualified” testers is something that hit me shortly after I released the iOS app. Before that I had only tested it on me, my girlfriend, my brother and my father (and that was only once!). I guess that shows how inexperienced I am in game development. If you read about professionals who make games you read about testers, beta testing periods etc. And the fact that it can take 40 people more than two years to make ONE game is totally alien to me, seeing as my experience is that it took one night and one person. That also shows in the iOS app. The concept has HUGE potential. For example, because the code is open source, many people have taken it and adapted it for their ad campaigns. One campaign, which took the script, changed the image of the ship, and launched a microsite with it had 300 000 unique visitors to it. The campaign won several awards and was nominated for a Cannes Lion (luckily, they had me in the credits too, which would be totally absurd if they hadn’t). Paramount used the idea too, which also had huge success (that ad is also going up for awards, I’ve heard). So anyway…

What I mean is that if an experienced game developer/company decided to do something out of this concept, it would be huge. But that would require many difference instances of knowledge. UX, menu designers, music composers, level designers, programmers, marketing, and that is not me. The iOS app gets a couple of sales a day, yet the bookmarklet has had over 1 million unique visitors. Why? Because the bookmarklet is a silly thing that you play with for 15 minutes, and the game (iOS app) has to be a game.

And on the topic of feedback: I mostly don’t trust user feedback. Back when I worked for the large swedish site, every time we launched a new feature, they hated it. 90% of the comments were about how it sucked and along the lines of “it sucks. i liked it more before”. The target audience for these sites were 13-17 year olds, and they are apparently really hard to please. During that period I learned a lot. Key things were: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If you think it’s broke, but the users don’t, change it gradually. Sneak in changes. Fix it over time. Don’t make a complete overhaul and release over one night. Your users will become disoriented and like you less. That is what I’m planning to do for the bookmarklet. Change the little things first, and let those changes grow, so the users know what is happening, and can follow the development.

When I ask users for feedback, I’m always very skeptical to their responses. One user might say something that only he doesn’t like or wants. It’s your job as the creator of something to know what is bad and what needs done. Asking users for feedback should only be done when you want to validate your opinion, but that might not even be the right time to do it. A wild estimate is that only 5% of your users are sharing their opinion. The other 95% you will never know what they want.

Feedback can be great when you want know how the users use your application/game. But don’t trust their words, look at their actions instead. Why don’t they click there, why did they choose that option, why don’t they know what do. Those are the questions you should be asking yourself when you’ve seen their actions. You have to analyze the feedback.

Erik has a new blog, including a interesting post-mortem of his game, at erikrothoff.com

Related posts:

1. Unintentionally designing with users.
2. Ian Marsh, creator of Tiny Tower, on user research, play-testing and F2P
3. Test with real users – not your team

Today I’ll be looking at the first 5 minutes of a successful social game, and highlighting which elements have made this game successful. In the future we’ll look at some games which have missed the point, and hence lost a large proportion of their customer base. From this, we can learn how to make an addictive social game.

The Game

The game we were originally going to study was intended to be Farmville, since Farmville is famously the ‘poster-child’ of social gaming success. However it wanted me to connect with my facebook account, and wouldn’t let me play without doing so. Game over!  (Presumably this is just an annoyance to me however, and hasn’t stopped the game’s success)

Instead, I looked at the ‘Top Grossing’ iPhone apps, and found ‘Smurf’s Village’. Like farmville, it’s a landforming game, where the player has to create a new village for the Smurfs, and look after their crops. Most importantly, it’s free, yet still a top-grossing app – clearly a sign of it’s continued success. (or was it all the work of this kid charging $1400 to their parents credit card) So, what happens in the first 5 minutes of Smurf’s Village?

The Experience

The first thing that happens when running the game is that it asks if I want to hook it up to facebook. This is a key business goal for the app developer, since it increases awareness of the game and is a key element to how social games work. Importantly for the user experience however, it is optional (unlike Farmville). I declined at this time:

Linking with facebook

After a very short introductory story, explaining why the Smurfs are moving, the game drops you straight into making a new village. With clear directions, the game tells me to click on the sign and lay a plot of land:

Planting a field

And with that, I get an immediate positive reaction “Quest complete”, and reinforcement of the lesson I just learnt:

Quest Complete

Now the same happens again with ‘growing blueberrys’, where an arrow clearly indicates what I need to do, and I’m given positive reinforcement having completed this task:

Planting berries...

And with that, a level up is gained:

Level up!

The game goes on, with the next level teaching you how to build a house, and crucially linking speeded up progress with using smurfberrys. Since smurfberries are the games in-app-purchase, and hence the primary method the developer makes money, this is an important link to make early on:

In app purchases

This earns me another level up. The game then goes on to repeat this to teach me how to build grass, before letting me play a mini-game to break up the monotony. If I were to continue playing beyond the first few minutes, the game would go on to ‘set me free’ and let me use the lesson’s I’ve learnt to continue to build the village unguided.

The Rules

So, what magic rules did we find that led to a successful first 5 minutes with this game?

1. Explain actions one at a time, let the player do them

• The game takes care to only show the player one action at a time, and first describes the task, before guiding them through performing the task themselves, to ensure that players know how to do it. The game then confirms the correct action has taken place after it has been completed, and tells the player what they did.
• By repeating the action numerous times, the game hence reinforces to the player how the action is achieved.

2. Reward the player for performing an action correctly

• When an action has been performed, there are multiple layers of success shown. Not only are there visible indications that the task has taken place, and the player is rewarded with both experience points and a ‘quest complete’ dialog, but the game also levels up the player’s village.
• Hence there is positive reinforcement that the correct action has taken place, causing the player to want to perform it again, much like Peggle’s Ode to Joy

3. Show the player the potential of what they can achieve

• By setting the game after the destruction of the original village, and allowing them to build a new one from the ground-up, this game highlights what can be done by the player if they were to continue playing.
• This message would potentially be reinforced by introducing the social element of the game, for it will be possible to see other player’s complete villages.

4. Let them take control

• After the tutorial period (admittedly longer than the 5 minutes I played for today), the game will hand over the reins to the player, having shown them what’s possible, and give the ability to create solutions in a manner of their own choosing.
• Although there will be continued goals to achieve, the method to achieve these goals becomes more free-form after the tutorial allowing the player to introduce creativity into their gameplay.

All these factors have been an important part of the continued success of this social game. Soon I will look at an alternative, unsuccessful, social game, and note what factors lead to its failure.

Related posts:

1. How to make an addictive strategy game
2. All Change – Apple’s new social gaming network
3. The usability of iPhone’s Game Center

However there was one area where the port to iPhone fell down, and became a usability nightmare. A main theme in Monkey Island 2 is swapping books at the library to solve puzzles, and the books are found using the card catalogue. The card catalogue is a collection of draws, as can be seen in the background here:

Note this picture is from the classic PC version

Each draw has lots of cards in, as pictured below. There are 207 cards in total in the catalogue.

And around 20 cards in each draw

You poke each card to read it, which can then be swapped for the correct book. The problem? First of all I thought there were only 5 cards in each draw, since that is the number of rows I could see – not realising that each tab was a different card. When I figured that out, the impossibility of the task became obvious.

The iPhone screen is only 5cm wide and 7cm tall. Each of those tabs can only be a few millimetres wide. I don’t have fat sausage fingers with hamburger hands, but I still found it incredibly difficult to select the right tab by poking my iPhone screen (remember the iPhone doesn’t have a stylus, which would be more suited to this type of interaction!).

This made the card catalogue puzzle a lot more difficult than intended, and difficult in the wrong way – surely not the developers aim. A method of cycling through the cards would improve the interaction here, or a large ‘hit space’ for each card. As it stands, the interaction is a legacy from when the game was mouse driven, and doesn’t work.

The only other problem I had with Monkey Island 2 was that I didn’t remember the game at all – apart from the ending! Doh! Amazing game though.

Related posts:

1. Usability Fail – Worms (and Worms 2)
2. Usability Fail – Twitter on iPhone
3. Usability Fail – Lotus Notes

Adding Games

Having been late to the party with game center, many of the games I owned had already been updated with game center functionality. However you wouldn’t know this from game center itself. I opened up the game center app, to find this:

Where are my games?

Oh, I don’t have any game center games. But that’s not right, as I know I do. I guess you have to press “Find game center games”. So I did. And I ended up on the app store. But I don’t want to buy any new games, I just want to use game center with my existing games.

Instead, to add your games to game center, you have to go through and open each game individually before game center will become aware of it. I have a lot of games. This will take some time. Surely Apple should have automated this, making the app automatically scan your phone for relevant games (or even giving an option if they didn’t want it to be automatic!)

Friends

Having successfully added a game, I wanted to find someone to play it with. I went to the friends tab, and was greeted with this:

Just like school all over again

Oh dear, that’s not very friendly. And the call to action (the + symbol up top right) is given very low priority. Surely that should be the first/only thing displayed on this screen if I have no friends. Currently, they’re just being mean.

(That said, anyone want to be my game center friends? I have none!)

Buttons

You may have noticed, in that first screenshot, what buttons look like in game center.

A button?

Since when has the word art ‘banner’ template ever been an appropriate icon for a button? Buttons generally are styled to encourage clicks, hence techniques such as using embossing to give a ‘3d’ effect, giving a depth that implies something push-able.

Instead they’ve decided to use a banner. Surely a banner implies that they are presenting information, like the page’s title, rather than requiring an action to be taken. Hence the ‘Find Game Center Games’ button looks more like information being displayed, and will prevent some users from taking the necessary action to find game center games (although, as described earlier, this button is not particularly helpful anyway!)

Sign-Up

And last of all, my favourite step of the signup process:

Signing up...

Game Center – great idea, but the execution still needs some work!

Related posts:

1. How to make an addictive social game
2. Perfect Dark – Game Usability from the 90’s
3. How real-world game usability testing is changing

Since my recent post on using mechanics from games to make dull tasks fun, a couple of upcoming applications have taken the step of applying some of the lessons from gaming, to make work fun. Epic Win is a ‘to-do’ list disguised as an RPG, and Dev Hub is a website creation tool with points. I’ll look at what these applications are, how they apply game mechanics, and how successful we can expect them to be at making dull tasks fun.

Epic Win

The new iPhone ‘game’ Epic Win is a productivity application (essentially a to-do list?) mixed with an RPG. After inputting your list of tasks (such as wash the dishes, or write a blog post), the game will reward you with XP for completing each task, allowing you to level up your character, as well as granting special items and other rewards.

Achievement Unlocked: Made Dog Useful

There is a trailer for Epic Win here, which may explain the theory better.

Essentially, through giving you points for achieving tasks in the real world, the game aims to incentivise the player to perform the real world tasks, by applying a common game mechanic.

DevHub

DevHub is a website creation tool, focusing on automating the process for creating blogs for niche topics (like this one?) and allowing authors to monetize their site (maybe I should be interested…)

Me, writing this blog

In the initial implementation, they found they had a problem. People were making only the simplest sites, using a small range of DevHub’s features. So to incentivise people to use a fuller range of features, they added game mechanics.

Now tasks like blogging, or linking your site to your facebook profile accrue points, which can then be spent on improvements to the site, such as new templates or widgets. This gives a gradual reveal of the site’s features, and gives the owner (player?) a sense of progression.

Thus game mechanics help DevHub’s users discover, and utilize a wider range of features than before.

Are they fun?

The game mechanics in both of these new applications seem to be simpler than those outlined as successful in the ‘Just Add Points’ presentation I covered recently. Both use points as a mechanic to incentivize players to repeat actions, or go further than they normally would. Points allow the clear construction of goals, and for progress to be measured. I imagine competition will become a key part of these two applications, as social media will allow players to compare and compete on points.

However many of the problems outlined in Sebastian Deterding’s presentation still apply.

• Epic Win doesn’t change the player’s goal (wash the dishes), it just monetises it, meaning the ‘fun’ derives from gaining points
• I cannot see how the validity of the points value can be enforced. Since the goals are self-assigned, and self-reviewed, players who want points will just set tasks such as ‘sit down’, and reward themselves (or just lie altogether).
• This makes points valueless, and hence points don’t help the game add ‘fun’ to achieving tasks.
• Also, this makes social comparison, a key factor in the success of points, flawed or impossible (so no high score tables)

DevHub may also run into trouble, since withholding features that can be found on other competing sites for no effort will only work if your site has a strong unique selling point. We’ll have to see what other monetizing blog hosts do.

It’ll be interesting to see how these applications do over the next few months. Deterding’s presentation implies that neither have a successful model for applying fun to dull tasks. I’m looking forward to seeing what the players think.

Related posts:

1. Applying Games UX lessons makes dull tasks fun!
2. The 5 secrets to happy players with Agile Games Development
3. Selling UX in games – everyone else is doing it.

An iPad Nano

Jakob Nielsen admits that the study is not as thorough as a typical usability study. However has decided to share it anyway, due to the over-inflated impact that usability studies produced early in a devices’ lifecycle have been seen to have. As an aside, this is an interesting contrary viewpoint to the disadvantages of being first-to-market noted in ‘Inmates’, which argues that being first to market is irrelevant compared to being ‘best’.

The report has some interesting key findings, including that the apps seen on the iPad and the iPhone suffer from the re-emergence of a problem not seen since the early 90’s. Unlike web browsers and desktop software, which has established graphical conventions to highlight buttons and GUI elements, iPhone and iPad software has not implemented standard conventions, such as making a clickable button appear 3D. Hence there is no consistent manner of designating important aspects of the UI, and users just didn’t know what they could click on. Nielsen likens this to the first emergence of graphical interfaces of the early 90s, when anything and everything could be a button.

Its therefore clear that the main recommendation of the study is to standardize common elements, like navigation, among first and third party applications, such as “swipe to turn page”, or “press and hold to delete”. This also links with the studies’ findings that users were unsure what reaction their action would cause, as the apps have yet to find a consistent manner in which to work.

Not just a big iPhone

The study highlights how the iPad is not just a big iPhone, and different usability issues emerged on the larger device – most pertinent is that navigation elements on the bottom of the page, as seen in many iPhone applications, will not work on the iPad. The larger screen means that these elements are too far from the user’s field of vision to be noticed – and hence are not appropriate. What this means for people who make apps is that a custom iPad version is needed, not just relying on the ‘universal’ up scaling of iPhone apps.

The full report is linked below, and worth a look if you’re interested in the usability, the iPad, or designing an application!

Read the full report, here.

Related posts:

1. Five essential iPhone apps for usability professionals
2. Usability Issues in Sharepoint
3. How real-world game usability testing is changing

This review aims to evaluate the playability of the game, including pertinent usability issues, and the effect this has on player experience. This is especially important, given 100 Rogues’ mission of making a difficult genre accessible. I’ve based the review on the heuristic points identified by Heather Desurvire’s paper ‘Using Heuristics to evaluate the playability of games’

What this review doesn’t cover is non-usability or player experience issues. Hence, it’s not a review of the game itself (which I gather is a pretty standard Rogue-like). It’s also not QA, and so doesn’t cover bugs in the game. This is especially important as 100 Rogues has infamously been plagued with a number of bugs since its release last week. The first version would crash if the player equipped a shield. The fix for this introduced several new bugs. And I still haven’t been able to get defeat the first boss without the game killing my player after I’ve defeated the boss. I gather the developers are working on this though.

100 Rogues

Game Play

Game play covers the game’s goals, and player’s involvement in achieving these.  100 Rogues succeeds in many areas here. Crucially, it guides the player through their first steps, and introduces them to the range of actions available to them, by immediately giving them the ability to level up their player, which is reinforced by the low cap for the second level up, allowing the player to practise this mechanic twice within the first 2 minutes of the game.

More complex actions are also introduced to the player, through the game’s challenge mode – a series of short scenarios where only the use of an advanced technique (such as ‘tele-stabbing’) will succeed. These introduce the player to some of the more complex moves available to them, in an intuitive way (rather than just… telling them)

The game handles the inevitable death of your character well, also. As mentioned previously, when playing a Rogue-like, you only have one life, no reprieves, and you will die. They explain this by likening the game to Tetris – the goal with your one life is to see how far you can get, not to reach the ‘end’. However death in any specific situation is never inevitable and the game always seems fair. This isn’t Mario Kart, where the CPU will always cheat at the last moment. Instead, after every death you’ll always believe that you could have done something differently and survived, and hence the game encourages a ‘one more go’ attitude to playing, and challenge comes off as a positive experience.

The only game play element which seems poorly balanced, and takes some of the control away from the player, is the ‘food’ mechanic. If you don’t eat food, your character dies. Makes sense. And sometimes you cannot find anything but rotten food, which will fill you up, but reduce your maximum HP. That’s fine too, if it’s a choice between being weakened, and death.  But sometimes the game will spawn no food at all. And then you’re stuck, and nothing you can do will save your character from death. This looks like it needs to be balanced in future games, so the game at least spawns some food (rotten or not) when the player is critically hungry. As it stands, the player doesn’t feel in control of their destiny, and has no ability to prevent their character from dying.

Pictured: 100 Rouges

Story

Story defines how your characters’ actions fit into the world you are presented with and the feeling that the game-space exists as a real world, which you can affect, but which exists without you.

The story in 100 Rogues is simple. Satan is at the bottom of the dungeons, and you must kill him. Why? Because he’s Satan.

This story is introduced by a cut scene at the start of the game, and loading text gives character-related background, however this is where the player’s involvement in the story ends. The in game content, and enemies don’t reflect this final goal (aside from the end boss), and the character development isn’t plot related.  Occasional infighting among the enemies gives the potential for further depth within the story, however this is not explored further. Ultimately, like Tetris, the story of ‘why’ you are doing this is not a focal point of the game.

Mechanics

Mechanics covers consistency in how the game reacts, how the AI acts, and how the player controls their character. The AI in the game is a success, with the NPC’s acting consistently, and yet occasionally surprising the player – such as when an archer’s miss-fired arrow will hit another enemy, and they will start battling it out.  Hence the game balances allowing the player to understand how NPC’s react, without making them entirely predictable.

The game allows the player to track their own progress, through in game score/stats, and a global high-score table. Although implementation of this isn’t perfect, as I’m not convinced scores are being posted to the internet, the bug has been noted and is being ‘worked on’.

An area where the mechanics of 100 Rogues fails is with its controls. The character is controlled by touching the screen – touch the screen at the top to make the player go up, or touch an enemy to attack them. However, with no confirmation before an action is taken, and no indication of the active areas for each target, I found myself ‘miss-clicking’ numerous times, with often deadly consequences. Hence, when trying to click on an enemy for a ranged attack, I’d instead walk towards them, putting my character in danger.  Restricting the range of actions available on a single click, or making ‘attack’ a double click, may help alleviate some of these issues.

Must be my sausage fingers...

Usability

Usability concerns how the game gives feedback for inputting actions, and whether they can achieve their goals. A success for 100 Rogues is how it saves the game state on quit, allowing the game to continue from the last point, as I’ve discussed before

As I discussed above, the game also gives direction to a first time player, by giving them an introduction to levelling up on game start. However, it hinders play the second time you start by… giving the same introduction. Since the game demands multiple play-throughs, I feel that I have grasped this mechanic the 20^th time it has been introduced to me.

Conclusion

As has been made clear by a heuristic evaluation of 100 Rogues, the game has a high degree of playability, and provides an accessible entry point to a traditionally difficult genre. As noted, there is room for improvement, yet the game offers significant advances on other games in this genre.

However, I’d be hesitant to recommend the game, as it stands, as a positive player experience. Although, playability shouldn’t include bugs, bugs will undoubtedly have an effect on player experience. Hence, as the game stands, the unexpected crashes and deaths will detract from player’s opinions of the game. What incentive do players have to give the time and effort of playing, when their character could be taken away from them through no fault of their own?

That said, the development team have been dedicated to fixing bugs – having released two patches in the week after the game was released, and are promising up to two-three times more content released periodically, which is an advantage of the iPhone as a platform. Within a few more iterations, I can see this game being the definitive introduction to the Rogue-like genre.

Related posts:

1. Pong – Playability Heuristics Review
2. Playability Review – 56 Sage Street
3. Driver: San Francisco Usability Review (Part 2)

Working in a small group at the University of Sussex, and in conjunction with the Brighton based mobile games company Locomatrix, we designed and prototyped a game that uses location as a game-play element. Unlike currently popular games, like Gowalla, we wanted the game to be immediate, and played as a short, fixed-term game, not an ongoing campaign. Hence, after evaluating several ideas, we developed a ‘Predator’ style game, where the players are hunted, and turned into hunters, until only one survivor remains.

Pretty much like Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory

Into every step of production of the game’s design we aimed to integrate usability and user experience tools. For example, the initial design of the game was based on a survey sent out to a group of prospective players, with their results collated to inform elements such as the game’s multiplayer element, objectives, and artistic style.

In the iterative prototype development cycle, user research was conducted. From the first paper prototypes, to the final JavaScript version of the game, real players were brought in, and asked to play the game. Their reactions and observations were noted by invigilators, and further developed through post-test questions. Hence, even before we had a playable version of the game, it was possible to test player’s reactions, and deal with problems earlier, rather than later, where they would cost a lot more time to resolve.

An early geolocation prototype

So what did we learn about mobile geolocation games? Exactly the same things that should be considered for any sort of product development.

We discovered the issue that was most crucial for the mobile geolocation game is considering the context in which the game will be used. The game we made was designed to be played outdoors, fast paced, and possible in a busy city. Hence the game’s interface needs to make this easy. We ended up with

• Very few buttons (one most of the time, a second one when you can tag a player)
• Large buttons (takes up half the screen)
• Audio cues associated with important activities, such as when the player is in danger, or when the can perform an action.

So, instead of having to stare at the screen all the time, the player is free to look at their surroundings, and only involve the phone when given an audio cue that they can act. They won’t need to hold their phones in front of their face as they play – crucial for not being mugged! And when they need to act, they can do so quickly and easily, not impeding the game-play.

The interface, which could have proved a huge barrier to a ‘fun’ game, has been minimised, as a consideration to the context in which the game is played. This was discovered as the optimal method through iterative prototypes and tests with users, and is heavily dependent on the type of game. A minimal interface may not be ideal for all applications (consider a first person shooter with one button), and yet the context of a geolocation game allowed it to succeed here.

So, what lessons could we take from the development of this game? More important than the discovery that outdoor mobile games work best with a minimal interface is the method used to make this discovery. Involving users brings advantages no matter what product is being made, or what stage production has reached. From the first paper prototypes, we could see the interface players preferred, and hence reduce development time and cost. The time ‘cost’ of involving users is greatly outweighed by the time it saves from redundant coding. And everyone can see the advantage of that!

Related posts:

1. Mobile Games should start quickly (lets get down to business!)
2. Games Usability Testing is not QA!
3. [Prototype] – Some UX and Usability thoughts.

What is a social gaming network?

As seen with Xbox Live, or Playstation Home, social gaming networks essentially all do similar things:

• Store high scores, often with leader boards for comparison with other players, by day/week/all time.
• Gives, and records achievements (or trophies) from within the game: meta-objectives which are publically listed on the player’s profile
• Contains a ‘friends’ list, of other players, with messaging facilities so that multiplayer games with these players can be arranged.
• Match finding, allowing the player to find suitable games that match their criteria, or games with friends.

Admittedly not terribly useful in solitaire...

Problems with social gaming networks on the iPhone.

The problems so far with implementation of these networks on the iPhone are caused by the wide number of competing systems.

Unlike the PS3 and Xbox, which each has one social gaming network on their device, Apple had (until last week) refused to act on implementing their own system, which has lead to the rise of many independent systems. Currently popular are: Crystal, Plus+, Openfeint, Agon and a recently announced competing network by Namco. Even ignoring the smaller, less widely implemented systems, there is still too much diffusion here.

Having a large number of competing systems offers an inconsistent user experience, with similar tasks (i.e. adding a friend) being handled differently on each system, which is ultimately detrimental to the player’s experience. Instead of playing the game, players have to spend too much time setting up accounts and adding the same friends from their other iPhone games.

The lack of a centrally imposed quality control means the implementation of these networks into games is rather haphazard. This can be seen with the free version of the iPhone ‘x-ray’ app, which emulates x-raying the player’s hand. The app has recently added Openfeint support, and so has achievements, leaderboards, a friend list, etc. These features don’t correlate with a single player, non-game. What sort of competition can a faux-x-ray have?

Achievement Unlocked: Found Keys

A closer inspection shows that the achievement points are all given for purchasing the paid version of the game. The social gaming network integration just serves to bribe the player with the chance to pay for points and inflate an artificial score (which can be compared to your friend’s score, see Farmville!).

What will Apple’s new system have to do

Apple’s system will have to improve the disjointed player experience that these systems currently give. To properly emulate the success, and ‘flow’ of the PS3 and Xbox’s networks, Apple should be aiming to entirely replace these competing systems.

The advantages of this would include:

• unifying all players under one system to ensure that friends can find each other, play against each other, without being spread across multiple systems
• The players only need to understand one workflow for each task (i.e. adding a friend), rather than learning the process for each system
• The player will only need to sign up once

• Achievement points earned in one game can be shared across all games, rather than just those on the same network, as currently.

Care would also have to be taken to enforce rules to ensure achievement points remain meaningful, by introducing a form of quality control to prevent poor apps from bribing people to download by handing out points cheaply.

When I ran user tests for an iPhone game last year, the openfeint login/sign up screens confused new users, who were just interested in playing the game. Apple will need to make the network invisible to uninterested parties, to prevent this. Perhaps this can link with their itunes ID, but the implementation of this is not obvious:- families often share an itunes ID across many devices

By introducing their own network, Apple have the opportunity to achieve a consistent, and hence improved, user experience when playing using the iPhone’s social gaming networks, and can only help things get better!

Related posts:

1. How to make an addictive social game
2. The usability of iPhone’s Game Center
3. Desperation & Disappointment: Social interaction in We Dare