As an Interaction Designer, I’m perpetually impressed with the continual design success inherent in most video games. We are taught to know our users by understanding their goals, leveraging mental models, and taking ourselves out of the equation in order to design useful and appropriate interfaces. And although a user-centered design approach is invaluable, I can’t help but wonder how game designers just seem to nail it time and again for what are large and diverse audiences.

Now, I have to confess that I’m not a hard-core gamer. I dabble on occasion, but mostly prefer to watch others play, as well as keep abreast of the industry. What is clear to me, is that the experiences are immersive, the storylines compelling, and the business itself, well, huge! So, just what is it about the domain-formerly-known-as interactive entertainment that makes it so engaging?

First, Knowing What We’re Up Against

Let’s be honest, doing your taxes using software as a service or completing a registration form isn’t exactly as enjoyable as a Halo LAN Party or rocking out in Guitar Hero. Gaming has a clear advantage here. This focus on the act of gaming is also very different than using traditional software, where the completion of a task leads one closer to a desired outcome or goal. Software is really just a means to an end; nothing more than a tool for most.

The game play journey on the other hand, can be as important to the user as achieving their goal of completing the game. A good experience needs to be rooted in an emotional dialog with a good story. One could even argue that the interactive component introduces another dimension altogether, thereby perhaps even making it more emotional as compared to a passive experience like watching a film or reading a book.

The sheer amount of time users invest in playing is also a major difference. Gamers can spend tens of hours practicing and honing their skills. That said, it also means that early stages are especially important because users won’t continue playing unless the experience is perceived as worthwhile.

New Media Culture, Meet Everyone Else

In the last few years, gaming has become much more widespread, having made tremendous inroads into Mainstreamville. You’d be hard-pressed not to find a console as the living room entertainment hub and the incredible success of the Nintendo Wii has contributed greatly.

The generation that grew up playing early video games is now also leading the way in designing experiences and their backgrounds have unmistakably influenced their work in the way of incorporating traditional gaming mechanisms. The gap between previously sovereign digital platforms has indeed converged, and they are now inextricably intertwined.

What that means, is that everyday users are now bringing mental models from what used to be segregated digital arenas to the interfaces we design. As Interaction Designers, it is our responsibility to understand that, so as to then be able to imagine and create designs users can intuit more easily. (I’d even go so far as to state that embracing this convergence actually makes our jobs that much more interesting, but more on that later).

OK, so gaming is popular and some really smart folks have begun to take the field seriously. Why should we care and what does all this mean? Well, there are interactions we can leverage (a kind of gamesmanship, if you will) in our day-to-day design work. Although we’ll need to set aside some of the advantages discussed earlier, there are still general principles we can learn from and borrow.

Everyday users are now bringing mental models from what used to be segregated digital arenas to the interfaces we design. As Interaction Designers, it is our responsibility to understand that.

Useful Game Design Techniques

In assessing some of the research out there and coupling it with my own experience, I’ve tried to corral some of the themes that emerged. Here is a collection of nine techniques with examples of how they might be applied.

The Edge and Back: Taking users to the very edge of their perceived comfort zones can have amazing affects. (Actually, this technique applies in all walks of life, but I digress). Video games tend to get harder as a user makes progress, meaning they’re also always getting better.

This technique can arguably be interpreted as being similar to what’s known within the user experience field as Progressive Disclosure. Exposing users to increasingly complex or advanced features as they gain familiarity with an application is powerful stuff.

Degree of Difficulty: Most games allow you to choose how challenging you want the experience to be. Some games even allow for practice tutorials and playable demos.

Complex systems that require a degree of mastery come to mind here; things like software for architects, which can do everything from actual 3D modeling, to budgeting for building materials. An embedded example project – much like the examples included within Adobe’s design products – also help users get started. (Can you imagine software that allows users to first choose their ability level; perhaps even incrementally increasing the level of complexity as they gain confidence?)

Power to the User: We all like to be in control and video games are empowering. As protagonists, gamers feel like they’re in command of their virtual world. This is actually pretty remarkable considering that most games are designed with a pre-determined outcome – albeit some more loosely than others. It’s that perception of being in control that is the real magic here.

On the web, examples can include giving users the freedom to come back to a registration process when they don’t have a specific piece of data available at that particular moment; or, allowing for partial completion of a profile (e.g., LinkedIn), potentially providing incentives to complete the process later.

You Are Here: Giving users constant status updates as to where they stand in their virtual world is something games do incredibly well. For example, being able to instantly access a level map at any time is very reassuring.

Translating this to web design can be as simple as using breadcrumb trails and status indicators during registrations or checkout flows. Bigger picture stuff can perhaps include encouraging exploration by showing users what percentage of an application’s features they have encountered up to that point (i.e., “Oh, I see that I’ve only been using this percent of the app; I wonder what else it can do?”)

“Tell Me What I Need to Know When I Really Need to Know It”: Providing users with information at the moment they need it most is something video games do a great job of. Games offer up useful tips that the user can dismiss or opt-out of entirely.

Having users learn through actual usage is key and inline links to contextual information/ help content is probably the most common application here. (see als: The iPhone is Not Easy to Use, by Fred Beecher)

Task Accomplishment and a Sense of Accomplishment: Traditional usability testing generally involves capturing metrics like: “Did the user accomplish Task A: Yes or No?” and the paths taken. However, when game developers test their wares, they also try to gauge the overall experience (i.e., Was it fun? Was it hard? Was it easy? Was it too easy? Would the user play again? Why or why not?) This focus on the large canvas logic – in addition to the usability of game play mechanics, of course – provides incredibly rich data that can be the difference between success and failure.

The takeaway here is to make sure stakeholders don’t become mired in the details around the success or failure of specific tasks and loose sight of whether the larger concept makes strategic sense.

Shared Experience: Capturing and then presenting issues that users encountered can be a wonderful way of educating the ones that come thereafter. The MMORPG EverQuest has a great deal of support available, but the game is designed to encourage “soloing” early on – meaning a user goes off to explore by themselves to gain experience. As the levels become more challenging however, “grouping” is encouraged so they can learn from one another in increasingly complex environments.

An interesting example of leveraging collective knowledge can be found within TurboTax, which uses their “Live Community” feature to bubble-up the most common questions during specific tax preparation steps. Answers from previous users and tax experts are displayed to the right of where users are working.

Sensory OptimumLoad: (Versus, of course, sensory overload, which is not a good thing). The highly interactive nature of gaming and the engagement of the senses is part of its allure. However, well-crafted games unfold their stimuli gracefully, allowing for a gradual period of acclimatization. Consistency is also a critical component because these interactions ultimately become a language the user relies upon. System feedback – in the way of visuals, sounds, and haptic controller vibrations – are an ongoing dialog.

As mentioned earlier, when users first encounter an interface, they bring their “baggage” in the way of existing knowledge from previous experience and conventions. They either expect things to behave a certain way; or, have to draw upon related experiences to try and make sense of them. This speaks to a need for standardization within a product, which hopefully also leverages established domain conventions.

FunNess: And lastly, having some fun is always good. Doing something that’s fun means it’s engaging, which in turn makes learning about it easier. Understandably, not every interaction can be a barrel of laughs, but there are plenty of ways to inject some creativity here and there.

Language and tone-of-voice is a simple way to make things a little more interesting. I recently encountered a mundane Terms & Conditions checkbox interaction that playfully stated: “Our lawyers make us do it.” That one sentence put a smile on my face and made me think a bit differently about the company. (see also JohnnyTV: Designing Humanity Into Your Products, by Bill DeRouchey)

Epilogue

As we have seen, convergence among what have historically been very siloed experiences has now expanded the universe of options Interaction Designers have to choose from. The challenge of course, is that the next-generation of experiences will not only need to be both useful and appropriate, they’ll also need to engage users more than ever before. My final words of advice in that case: choose wisely, be creative, and don’t be afraid to inject some fun. All in all, I’d say things just got a lot more interesting.

Top image: Wii promo photo

We were all beginners once. I was reminded of this when I was given a new cellphone (from my work, meaning I had no idea what it would do, and thus hadn’t done any research). As I struggled to figure out how to lock the keypad, and turn on predictive text, I found myself going through an extreme cycle of emotions which, as a technophile, I didn’t realise I did.

1. Neutral (tad of anticipation): what’s it going to be like?
2. Disruption/confusion. Try to lock the keypad like I did on my other phone, doesn’t work. Same with predictive text. What the …?!
3. Impatience. Trying other options. Still doesn’t work. Getting annoyed.
4. Very annoyed. I hate this thing.
5. Resignation. I give up. Where’s the manual?
6. Discovery. Find page. Ooooh. That’s how.
7. Anticipation (again). OK, let’s try this again….
8. Revelation. It works! Why didn’t I try that before?
9. Complacence. Of course that’s how you’d do it. I can’t remember not knowing it.

These cycles of learning happen so fast, that once they’re over, it’s easy to forget they even happened. But they’re there. Turns out that going back on the same ‘intuitive’ functions for my other phones showed that they were equally arbitrary. And come to think of it, I’d had similar initial experiences with the iPod, Mac OSX, Windows Vista … and of course, Microsoft Office 2007.

What’s the point I’m trying to make?

Digital devices can never be inherently ‘intuitive’, as the fact that they deal in abstraction automatically means that actions must be arbitrary. (An aside: for those who argue that much of gestural and time based interactions are intuitive, remember that this assumes a Western way of looking at space and time. Anthropologists would tell you that there are other ways). In other word, interfaces aren’t ‘intuitive’, they’re ‘intuited’: before that, there’s nothing ‘intuitive’ about them at all. A famous example of this is when Star Trek’s Scotty lands on earth and tries to use a computer mouse as a microphone:

Usability guru Jared Spool calls this discrepancy ‘the knowledge gap‘, and provides the following advice:

The knowledge your users have when they arrive at the design (current knowledge), what knowledge they’ll need to complete their tasks (target knowledge), and what the design needs to do to help them complete the task (the gap) are the key ingredients for making an interface that seems ‘intuitive’ to your users.

He continues that the conditions of an interface being intuitive are either that the user already has the target knowledge, or that design helps bridge the gap so that they are trained “in a way that seems natural”. I believe that this can be expanded upon. One way would be through phenomenology, but another framework I’ve come across in the social sciences is known as the knowledge matrix.

Separating out what people think they know (perceived knowledge) and actually know (attained knowledge) creates four quadrants, all with potential applications in interfaces:

1. They Know They Know: The general standards – for example with a mobile phone that is currently the power button, call and hangup systems, keypad method of dialing number etc. Mess with these at your peril – unless you’ve got a really good reason (see next header)
2. They Know They Don’t Know: In other words, they’re ready to learn. Think iPhone touch screen or on a lesser scale, keyboard shortcuts. The good thing about these is that people expect some training, so if there is a great enough reason you can challenge some of the known-known attributes: e.g. iPhone doing away with the keypad. Manuals, help menus, and hints can all help.
3. They Don’t Know They Know: These can be the little design features that make a project loved. As Spool describes it: “the user is completely unaware the design is helping them bridge the gap. The user is being trained, but in a way that seems natural”. However, for this to work, it requires dedicated user testing. Scott Jenson from Google Mobile has a great presentation about how Google Mobile Maps used the buttons in an unconventional way that users picked up after around 30 seconds. This can also be a matter of incorporating other standards in so that the user may inadvertently use them and get a pleasant surprise. I got a pleasant surprise using Twitteriffic when I absentmindedly hit Return-R as I would to refresh a page in Firefox, to find that it did exactly the same thing.
4. They Don’t Know They Don’t Know: This can mean things completely out of the user’s frame of reference (“it does that?”), or more ominously, unpleasant surprises (like my phone example above). The frame of reference issue involves some form of enlightenment, be it a friend, tutorial, or just browsing through the options. By making options available for discovery, the user is likely to find it. The unpleasant surprises is a more difficult one, normally involving changing behaviour (as opposed to knowing you don’t know which is more about starting from scratch). The underlying is that users initally think “they know they know”, when in fact it’s the opposite. Hence the intial reaction will be pretty bad. The answer is, in the words of Steve Krug, to make them become “kayak shaped problems” that right themselves. Having a dramatically different look to a particular function/removing a button etc. can also get around this in a way by making it something that people know they don’t know. For more on this,  Jensen Harris’s comprehensive presentation about the redesign of Microsoft Office 2007 is well worth looking at.

What can also be interesting is imagining how people move through these phases of knowledge. Again, going back to my phone example, it would look like the model on the right. A bit like a game of hopscotch, the aim is to get to the top right, no diagonals allowed!

While this model has a few kinks in it (e.g it can’t quite deal with the slippage while someone has to relearn something that they didn’t know they did’t know, and doesn’t in this state separate out task from action), it’s still a useful way – along with user testing of course! – of remembering how users learn to ‘intuit’ a device.

Top image by futurestreet