Untitled for Now

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.