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Delightful and frustrating UX in video games

Did you know that 40.75% of the world’s population is a gamer? That’s a whole lot of user experiences which need to be designed, and why gaming has become a huge industry for UX designers to work in.
While I’m not working in the gaming industry myself, I’ve spent a lot of hours enjoying a number of games in the last two years. As a UX designer, I couldn’t help but recognise common UX patterns, leading to some delightful experiences, and some frustrating ones which had an impact on the overall enjoyment of playing the game.
A lot of this article will discuss things like menu screen design, information display and HUD (the method by which information is visually relayed to the player as part of a game’s user interface. ) If you want to find out more about UX design and how it applies to gaming design, or the difference between the two, you can read about it here.
I appreciate the challenges that UX and UI designers working on these games face and I have every admiration for their work.
I should also point out, I completely missed the PS3/Xbox 360 era, and most of the PS4 era as well, so most of the games mentioned here are recent releases of the past 2 years, except for one or two older ones and remakes. I’m sure there are plenty of older games which are worth mentioning that I’ve left out…