Posts Tagged ‘usability’
Usability Fail – Monkey Island 2
Just a quick one today, that I’ve been sitting on for a while. I recently played, and loved, the Monkey Island ports on the iPhone. In general the pacing is perfect for mobile gaming, and I am strongly hoping that they port Day of the Tentacle next!
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
Ethnography as an application of third space theory
After many competing companies had failed, IBM were tasked with creating an air traffic control system. As you can imagine in this setting a correct solution was crucial – lives were at risk if anything went wrong. The first thing IBM’s designers did was go to the air traffic control tower for a few weeks, and watch how they worked. But why? And how did this influence the design process? Today, we look at ethnographic research, and how it is based in the theory of the ‘third space’.
Tony Gowland on playtesting for web-based games
Tony Gowland is a UK based video game designer and recently created the critically acclaimed puzzling platform game Tealy and Orangey (You should go try it now. I’ll wait…). I asked him to share his unique perspective on the role of user experience and play-testing in the game’s development. Tony shares with us his views on how user insight is particularly important for producing web based games, how he recruited playtesters and how the balance between ‘top-down design’ and playtesting influenced the production of his game.
Usability Fail – Twitter on iPhone
This week I have another small usability issue that would be incredibly easy to identify and fix with small scale user testing. This time it’s with Twitter on the iPhone.
Typically people read the oldest tweets first, working up to the latest ones. The app is made to support this, retaining your ‘last read’ tweet, so you can read up from there.
Another feature of Twitter on the iPhone is, if you’ve been away a while, your timeline will be missing entries. You’ll see a tear, like in the picture below, and clicking this will download the missing tweets into your timeline.
Downloading missing tweets...
Now the usability issue here is small but incredibly annoying. When the tweets download, you’re presented with the latest ones first, and the oldest ones at the bottom. Completely the opposite to how people use the twitter app, reading the oldest ones first. Effectively this means scrolling down a list of potentially hundreds of tweets, looking for where you were before clicking the tear (which is not indicated).
The workaround I currently use is behaviour that would be spotted straight away, and fixed, by usability testing. To prevent being taken to the most recent tweet, the user has to ‘press’ the tear, but then scroll down to hide it from view, before taking a tentative peek up the timeline after 10 seconds or so to see if the act has been successful.
User testing would quickly identify this behaviour, and make it unnecessary by fixing the problem. Instead of showing you the most recent tweet when ‘filling in the blanks’ of the timeline, Twitter should take you to the oldest, hence not breaking the user’s flow, and aligning with how the rest of the app works.
Job done!
5 predictions for Games UX in 2011
2010 was a great year for usability and user experience in games. As a growing industry, recognition and understanding of what UX means to games has grown many-fold. But 2011 is going to be even better.
I thought it would be fun, based on the trends seen towards the end of last year, to start the new year by giving some predictions as to what will happen within the field of games UX in 2011. Next year, we can see how I did!
Luckily I've been swotting up!
