Designers: you should be playing more videogames
What is the method behind remarkable experiences?
When we think about User Experience and Product Design, it’s common to think about our everyday apps and website interfaces. But we rarely think about one of the categories of digital products that rely most on user experience to succeed: Video Games.
Of course, a non-intuitive website, app, or physical product will not be very successful if its experiences are poorly thought out, but still, we see many products on the market that are clearly not designed to please the user and yet continue to be bought and used because they’re necessary. A game that you spend your precious salary to buy and hope to get hours and hours of pure entertainment depend on positive feedback from its users to make sense for other people to buy it.
During the pandemic, I started to study new subjects as a hobby, and found myself fascinated by Digital Art and 3D. That’s how I started to pay more attention to the technical part of the games I played and loved so much. As a Product Designer, I started thinking about the game ideation process and ended up watching an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto — creator of Super Mario Bros — where he explains a lot about how the process of creating this project was and how it resembles the process of a Product Designer.
Miyamoto explains that one of the main challenges for him — and also one of the main reasons for the success of Super Mario Bros — is to create a game that is as easy as possible to learn how to play without needing to be explained, and gradually add new challenges and new features as the jurney unfolds. If you make a game that starts with several options available, with a high challenge level and not enough time to learn, many people would give up because they are frustrated and not having fun.
The opposite is also a problem, if the game doesn’t present anything new and challenging during the gameplay and if you run out of new things to do too soon, it will be a very boring game that won’t leave you in the mood to continue exploring. Finding the balance that creates a fun journey, that will surprise you and deliver new complexities at the right time and create challenging but not impossible obstacles, requires a lot of study and, of course, a LOT of testing.
“There’s a lot of testing whilst the game is being built. I don’t give any verbal explanation and just watch them play and see how they do it. Most of the time I think they’ll play it a certain way or enjoy a certain part and they end up not doing that. Then I have to go back and use that as feedback.”
— Shigeru Miyamoto
To get to this point, Miyamoto says that the last stage to be created in Super Mario Bros was the first one. The reason why is that first he needed to know what he was going to present to the players during the complete game and only then, he would know what and how he should prepare them for the next levels.
Despite the fact that this process is being refined for nearly 4 decades, this formula continues to be successful today. And for being responsible for creating so many products that evoke such a remarkable, pleasurable and stimulating experience, this process has a lot to teach to Product Designers.
Up next, I would like to talk about some of the aspects that I find most interesting in games and that I try to put in my projects.
A few lessons we need to learn from games
1. Learning the basic moves
It may sound obvious, but many product segments have not done a good job when it comes to user learning process. As mentioned before, most games — complex or simple — have fully dedicated levels designed to introduce you to this new world, establishing a context and teaching you how to handle the challenges that are to come. Some games provide simple instructions for you to perform the actions that will be necessary for future tasks, others show the basics and let the user learn the rest on their own, gradually, and others don’t even give instructions, just put you in the game and give you tips as the tasks require specific actions.
We see many basic prototyping programs with tutorials on how to get started on the platform and from there, users will feel comfortable to go venturing into the more complex actions that the tool has to offer. Meanwhile, some other tools — especially those for more complex tasks, such as 3D Modeling or professional editing — turn out to be a nightmare for those who just want to get into the tool and learn on their own. Unfortunately this drives away many people who have good ideas from the tools they need to execute them, due to their technical difficulty in learning, requiring hours and hours of tutorials and months of practice to get used to the features that the program has.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the layout of complex platforms, which are necessary for complex tasks, can’t always be simplified. And I am not criticising a specific. And I’m not criticizing a specific platform here, in fact I think some do a very good job because of the level of complexity that the activity itself requires. But I believe that we always have to think about the purpose of our platform. “Do we want to attract as many people as possible to allow more talents to emerge?” “ So how can we facilitate the learning process for these new users?”
2. Time to choose a character for your journey
It’s common to see games making us choose between a few characters with different attributes or customize the abilities of our hero according to the gameplay style the player wants. For example, we can adapt our character to be very strong and resistant so we can get into a one-on-one confrontation and go out for violent fights,but we can also make our character more agile, quick and skillful, if we want to go unnoticed and stealth, taking our enemies by surprise. This makes the game experience suitable for the varied gamers who may come to play the game.
We can see this in some digital products as well. Airbnb, for example, can tailor the entire app based on what you want. It will soon ask you what type of accommodation you are looking for, your purpose with it, and then bring up a selection of locations that might make the most sense to you. Other products such as music apps, online tools and even web browsers can customize the entire platform layout and even the way you use your tools so that the user has a fully personalized experience.
3. Tasks & Rewards
I believe that any game can be simplified as one or more challenges that you need to solve to be rewarded — either directly through in-game rewards, or just by the satisfaction of having managed this challenge — . We see in a lot of games a multitude of tasks available to get some benefit in the game to move forward or simply to shut down those reminders that something was left behind.
It is also common to see that as we are completing these tasks, our status is being improved to feel that we are being praised for our efforts.
Some educative platforms today do this with excellence, almost turning the learning process into a pastime. It is the example of Duolingo. This platform managed to replace the game that I used to play on my phone everyday simply by mimicking exactly the triggers that a game brings. Daily challenges, ranking with other “players”, activity rewards, etc. I could do an entire article on how Duolingo is an example to be studied of gamification of a language learning platform, but there are already many case studies of the platform, such as this great article in here.
4. Make it fun
Of course, it’s not easy to make an insurance app as entertaining as Candy Crush, but we can take some of these lessons to apply to our products and m ake our user experience a little more shaped for a gradual understanding and easy learning process. Each product has its own peculiarities, but I believe that at least one or two insights from games are useful for every type of product.
I’m not implying that the result will be the user entering your health insurance app for fun while he has nothing to do, but at least we can make him understand what’s left to be done more clearly, what he has to do, what is available and how to access the necessary content or tools. We can make educational platforms for children and teenagers that are not boring, but instead, provides them the same experience of completing the tasks of one of their games, and that they even feel like spending more time on them.
We see so many platforms being so effective at using various FOMO and gamification techniques to keep their users on it, that many debates about cell phone addiction have arisen because of it. I believe that a lot of this can be used for good, transforming activities that are important and that are often tied to tedious and complicated processes, into an easy and uncomplicated experience, like many of the examples cited above.
