When I play a game on a console or computer, I expect it to help me to learn how to best play it. That’s why when I packed last night for my vacation I took the 3 new Nintendo DS games I’d bought but not played, tossed them in my luggage and left the instruction at home. My feeling being that if I couldn’t figure things out with the controls and mechanics in the first 30 minutes or so, it’s not really going to appeal to me in the long run anyhow. With users of websites and internet based games, the attention span is more like 30 seconds - likely because they’ve not shelled out $40 on it. This got me to thinking about how we keep people in our websites/games/private-little-worlds.
Creating this kind of learning environment for a user of a game or website is more challenging than most people would expect. And as with most things, if you’ve done it right, people won’t notice anything at all. But that’s all part of the job now isn’t it. A couple thoughts I’d share on how to get the ball rolling in a user’s brain :
Teach them in small steps, a bit at a time and not too quickly. Once you’ve shown them how things work, let them have a play with things to truly wrap their mind around it.
Visual design and functionality shouldn’t stray too far from the norm. Stick with the standard usability vocabulary the user would expect, atleast in the beginning. Things like rollovers, clicking, scaling objects, etc. As the user spends more and more time in your little world, you can start throwing new tricks at them - but don’t expect them to pick everything up right away with a lame excuse such as “it’s easy, everyone should understand this”. If you’re saying things like that without actually justifying your ideas, then it means there’s probably a lot more to your idea than you initially thought and will take more time for people to grasp.
Every step or so, introduce something new. When you do this, you’ll also find that for the first 1/3 or the journey, instructions will have to be pretty blatant and verbose. After that you can be a little more vague and let the user figure more and more out for themselves. If they’ve stayed in your experience this long, odds are they’re going to keep pushing forward.
Just today I had a play with the Science Museum Game “Launchball”, created by the clever folk over at Preloaded. To put it quite frankly, I was floored. The usual Preloaded care and attention to detail is all there, down to each and every pixel, as you’d come to expect from the boys in blue. What really got my attention though, was the usability of the game and the excellent way it taught me how it behaved as I went, while also throwing new things at me each step. When new blocks became available, it didn’t feel like an extra obstacle or annoying requirement to finish a level - it felt like a reward, driving me forward to play more and more. I almost laughed out loud as well when I had spent over 2 minutes on a puzzle, and a pop up appeared offering me help on completing the level!
Well done guys, I’d tip my hat to you, but I’m too busy playing your game! To those who haven’t seen it, get over there now and have a play.
It’s been a busy month for us at unit9. We’ve just completed work on this year’s Carphone Warehouse X Factor site. Like last year’s campaign, this year you can call in from a mobile and leave an audition singing one of eight songs. This year’s site has added a lot to that though, and the user can now sing via a PC microphone, draw a character’s face and have it sing for them. We’ve also added the ability to deeplink into an audition so that people can share performances over email, or on Facebook. There’s even the capability to download the performance to mobiles.
While working on a Flash AS3 site recently, we’ve encountered an odd issue where Mac Pros and Mac Minis didn’t seem to be registering sound via the microphone. Things did seem to work fine though on Windows machines, and also Macbooks and Macbook Pros. Very odd indeed.
One thing to note though, through testing we noticed that calling the method with -1 caused the Windows machines to not record properly. Macbooks and MacBook Pros still worked with -1. Windows seems to prefer that you call the method with no argument. So to enable both platforms, it’s best to do an if statement to check which platform the client flash is running on, and then run the appropriate code.
I had a 4th of July BBQ this year at my pad for all the unit9ers who could attend. The evening went great, with one humorous and dangerous exception. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you set off a $100 firework that is 1 foot wide and 3 feet long upside down?
The vantage point of the camera is taken from my roof terrace, with me down on the street lighting this off. Rockets impacted buildings on all sides. At about 1 minute into the video, the box tipped over and started shooting rockets right at me. I ran like heck with them flying over my shoulder. Lucky for me, a friend had parked his shiny new motorcycle in between us, and you can see half the rockets impacting it and then blowing up! The bike escaped mostly undamaged with a minor dent in the fuel tank. I was unharmed after fleeing for my life around the corner of my building!
Here at unit9 we’ve noticed that Firefox 3 for Mac OS X is creating visual issues on many of our flash sites. In particular, on sites where we use SWFAddress to deeplink into our flash site, when the URL in the address bar changes the Flash site then flickers off then back on.
I was unable to find this issue listed in the current release notes. So far the only information I’ve found has been posted by Adobe employee Mike Chambers who has posted an article on his blog about the issue.
While this may just be Release Candidate 3 (a beta) of Firefox 3, it was released on June 11th, and the finial release of the full product is scheduled for June 17th. One can only hope that Mozilla and Adobe can work to fix this issue.
I got to talking with my friend Steve Abreu about James brown, dubbed “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business”. He sent me onto the following clip, which really illustrates this. Make sure to watch till atleast 1:35 minutes into the clip for maximum enjoyment.
The theatrics of this performance are incredible. The effort, timing, emotion - all carefully prepared and executed brilliantly. I give a number of short, entertaining speeches to my company and things like this really give me inspiration to give the best speech I can. I hope you too can take away something from Mr. Brown’ performance as well.
As this is the first post on my new site, I thought I’d take a moment to introduce myself, and illustrated just what I intend to gain from this exercise, and what you the reader can expect.
My name is Tony Volpe, I’m a 29 year old American who has been living in London for the last 7 or so years. For the last six of those years I’ve worked at unit9 first as a designer/developer, then technical leader for projects, and I now fill the roale of Head of Development. My professional interests are usability, team development, design, flash sites, and inter-group communication of technical challenges.
Outside of work I enjoy running - I’ve completed the 2005 Edinburgh Marathon in 3:55, reading - mostly fiction and science fiction, console and computer games - such as the Final Fantasy series and World of Warcraft.
Through this publication I’d like to highlight issues that come to mind through my day to day work including views on usability through my experience, and solutions to problems that we face quite often in the Web Industry. I may also cover more casual issues that concern my interests outside of my professional life. I intend to keep my professional and personal posts separate through the use of “categories” in the Word Press system, so you the reader will be able to navigate posts more efficiently.
Please feel free to leave feedback on the site positive or negative, though I reserve the right to remove unconstructive comments from the site, as there is nothing to be gained by them.
