{"id":1288,"date":"2011-02-14T19:22:48","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T18:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stevebromley.com\/blog\/?p=1288"},"modified":"2019-11-06T17:45:01","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T16:45:01","slug":"usability-fail-monkey-island-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stevebromley.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/14\/usability-fail-monkey-island-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Usability Fail \u2013 Monkey Island 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just a quick one today, that I\u2019ve 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!<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\n
\"monkey

Note this picture is from the classic PC version<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Each draw has lots of cards in, as pictured below. There are 207 cards in total in the catalogue.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Monkey

And around 20 cards in each draw<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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 \u2013 not realising that each tab was a different card. When I figured that out, the impossibility of the task became obvious.<\/p>\n

The iPhone screen is only 5cm wide and 7cm tall. Each of those tabs can only be a few millimetres wide. I don\u2019t 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\u2019t have a stylus, which would be more suited to this type of interaction!).<\/p>\n

This made the card catalogue puzzle a lot more difficult than intended, and difficult in the wrong way \u2013 surely not the developers aim. A method of cycling through the cards would improve the interaction here, or a large \u2018hit space\u2019 for each card. As it stands, the interaction is a legacy from when the game was mouse driven, and doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

The only other problem I had with Monkey Island 2 was that I didn\u2019t remember the game at all \u2013 apart from the ending! Doh! Amazing game though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just a quick one today, that I\u2019ve 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[117],"tags":[40],"class_list":["post-1288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games-user-research","tag-bad-ux","grve-entry-item","grve-blog-item"],"yoast_head":"\nUsability Fail \u2013 Monkey Island 2 - Steve Bromley - User Research<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.stevebromley.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/14\/usability-fail-monkey-island-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Usability Fail \u2013 Monkey Island 2 - Steve Bromley - User Research\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Just a quick one today, that I\u2019ve been sitting on for a while. 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