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Do Games Know The Secret Of UI?
A reader writes "There is a nice interview at the BBC talking about how computer games are the ones pushing the envelope. Particularly interesting is it doesn't just deal with the tech aspects, but goes into the user interface aspect as well." Having conversed with her on a number of occasions, I can attest to JC being smart. Good interview.
Part of the challenge of the game was figuring out the UI. :)
You know, just about every damn time I try to connect to the BBC site via slashdot (including with this story) it doesn't work. There appears to be something REALLY dicked about a lot of DNS servers. I suggest that from now on, instead of linking to the bbc URL you guys use the IP address, which always works.
MOST of the time the BBC url is broken and gives an IMMEDIATE "unknown host" message. Type in the IP and viola! Instant connection.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Gamers want fancy interfaces. I know someone who's a huge fan of Civ, Alpha Centauri et al., but when I introduced him to FreeCiv his first comment was "the interface sucks". This isn't someone who's computer illiterate, either.
It seems that people want something different when playing a game. They don't want just their standard operating system look, they want fullscreen fancy eyecandy, even when that's not the nicest option.
You can even see this in game editors -- AFAIK, WorldCraft is the only editor even close to the standard OS style...
Whether it's because the whole screen should look SciFi / Fantasy / Whatever, or simply because users want something different, game interfaces have to be different from usual programs.
remember there are other applications (other than just the military and games as she mentioned) that use most of the CPU (RC5, Netscape ;))
this really has little to do w/UI. It has to do w/what she feels is important in the industry at this time (cell phones that are connected).
It's true that games love faster CPUs but it is also true that it is probably possible to make much faster/better games in the standard constraints that we already have but people don't care to do that anymore (remember 64k games that looked cool as hell or even 4mb games?)
Sending your picture in front of the Eiffel tower to your kids on your cell phone is less important than decreasing the bloat!
Hemos knows Jesus? Maybe he can let us know which distribution The Lord uses, and if he prefers vi or emacs - then we can decide for ourselves if he's smart or not.
*sigh* This is what I tried to tell my uncle last weekend when he shelled out way too much money for a 1.4 GHz P4 with a Geforce2 and 128 megs of RAM to run Microsoft Windows/Office. He believes buying a top of the line system now will save him from having to buy another one in a couple years. Ha! Good luck. Lusers just won't listen.
What Hertz SHOULD have said is that games are the only commercial applications used by the masses that maximize CPU useage ...
...
Yes, I'm sure no one has ever maxed a CPU for hours or days on end modelling fluid dynamics, or physical optics, or encoding mpegs, or
-... ---
What a game would do is immediately give you those three features and then as you progressed and became a more powerful character it would give you more features
Mr. Clippy: I'm sorry, you're not experienced enough to change text colors yet. Try underlining it for now!
... I mean, I'm all for faster CPU's, more RAM, better video cards, higher bandwidth, etc.
...
But I don't see games pushing the UI envelope in a way that's useful to most user tasks. Sure, game developers put an enormous amount of effort into creating detailed, realistic virtual environments, and that's great -- for games. But attempts to introduce such elements into OS's in general, and into general-purpose applications like word processors, graphics programs, and browsers, will lead only to clutter and bloatware. You don't need realistic lighting and fog effects when you're writing a letter
Browsers are an area that deserve special mention. I've seen a few attempts to use game-type visual metaphors to turn cyberspace into something Gibsonian (anyone remember Hotsauce?) and the effect is always ugly, pointless, and slow. Make the hardware fast enough, of course, and "slow" will go away, but "ugly" and "pointless" will remain.
When I'm playing a game, I want to be immersed in a virtual world. When I'm writing, or designing graphics for a Web site, or pounding out code, or looking for information on some obscure subject, I want a clean, simple interface that makes it as easy as possible for me to get, create, or manipulate my data. And that's it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I think this article is a little unrealistic. I agree that many games have exciting and interesting features which take time to develop and give you a sense of completion and understanding, but I don't believe this applies to other applications. Specifically it is this statement that I don't agree with:
What a game would do is immediately give you those three features and then as you progressed and became a more powerful character it would give you more features.
That's really cool in games, I love the accomplishment of attaining the highest level, but when I open MS Access I want to be able to jump right in and program modules rather than be greeted with a form creation wizard or what not. I'm the type of computer user (like most people here probably) who wants all the features I can get my hands on. Throw them all out me, and I'll determine what it is I need.
~ now you know
Incremental disclosure with sticky adaptation, the single UI principle discussed in the interview, has been well known in the design community since the 1980's.
Just because Microsoft doesn't make good use of the principle doesn't mean that it's a gift from gaming to the rest of the world.
In most other ways, games are UI nightmares. They're difficult by design. Applying their principles to other domains would be a giant step backwards. Non-entertainment systems should be easy by design, rather than conjuring obstacles for the thrill of overcoming them.
Fans of UNIX will, of course, disagree. The popularity of archaic command-line interfaces in the UNIX subculture could perhaps be understood as a consequence of gamer-like behavior among hobbyists and tinkerers.
Tim
I'd disagree that games necessarily are better for UI development, it's just that games have a lot more wiggle room in terms of bad user interface. A game like Leisure Suit Larry can get away with not having standard looking buttons, and a game like Myst III: Exile can get away with not having standard looking icons.
It doesn't mean however that games can have bad UIs. The eGames sample I stupidly picked up has one of the worst interfaces possible, and most of the games are individually difficult to manage.
And finally, it's worth pointing out there's no standard UI for a laser blaster. ("The cross-sight must be in red, with a slightly thicker line near the center...")
Beware typoes.
"Kai's Power Tools" had a game-like interface. Users started out with a few simple tools. After demonstrating competence using the basic tools, users advanced to the next level and more tools became available. This was hated. Rumors that Kai was going to redo the user interface for Photoshop resulted in a sizable protest to Adobe.
Game user interfaces work because you can't do much. Move and shoot works well. Nothing else does.
This is of course the essence of great UI design: it should be quick to learn, fairly obivous (note lack of word 'intuitive'
I think most game builders are too busy trying to be different from their competitors than to confer with each other on standardizing their interfaces. I could be wrong: I don't play a whole lot of video games, but GoldenEye and Perfect Dark had fairly simlar UIs, adjusted of course for different functions withing the game.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
RTFM
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
Real slackers never RTFM.
C-X C-S
I wouldn't mind seeing a game-like UI for stuff like Office and crap like that. I would turn the option on for most users. Of course myself, I'd rather have everything there, so it exists when I need it.
Of course I can see people doing stuff along the lines of Final Fantasy.. Click there, open this pop-up box, type that, twist this and belch and volia you have the ultimate resume wizzard. But you can only get this after 90 hours of churing out presentations, databases (wannabe), spreadsheets and documents. I can almost see the spam that would create in an office environment.
I guess what I'm getting at, there are users that know enough to use some of the advanced features, but don't need them for everything. How can you enable these features without running a typical M$ gauntlet. (i.e. trying to update IE2.0 on a fresh NT install, yet the new version of IE requires a new service pack, but you can't get the new service pack 'cause the page to download it won't open in IE2.0)
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
Hemos, Don't worry, games don't know the secret of U and I. And I will keep my promise not to say anything. So don't worry my little soldier boy :-).
Kisses
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
The only thing that will push a computer to its limits is a game. No one admits it but no one needs a new computer to do a spreadsheet programme or Word document.
The problem with the industry is nobody admits jack shit. Marketing folks seem to think everyone wants to buy airline tickets, but we all know pr0n built the Internet.
No one wants to get a trailer on their mobile phone. What people want to do is take a picture of themselves and their spouse in front of the Eiffel Tower and send that image to their teenage daughter back in England
Over in Japan, the most popular thing for 3G phones are entertainment (Pr0n and Instant messaging). One game, you can chat with an IA women and try to see how far you can push it before she gets mad.
For consumers its Entertainment, music, pr0n or video games. Business customers might pay 5x the price for the service, but you have 100x average consumers.
Come to think about it, I bets thats why they sell so many vibrating batteries.
There's a lot to be said for consistancy in UI. While games introduce some daring new metaphors and interaction models, it doesn't do a whole lot of good when each iteration forces you to relearn several of the skills you already learned (this, by the way, is also my beef with Mac OS X. People learn how to use a finder and you make them use a totally new one!)
On the simplest level it's things like the 'inverted mouse' problem in FPS games, but whenever a hot game developer figures out a cool way to convey manipulation of another custom game feature, it detracts from the learning curve.
It's a shame that 'pushing the envelope' and 'consistancy of design' are orthogonal terms. It would be great of the game designers got together and admitted that they're each trying to make the better game, but that establishing consistant design patterns for interactivity can increase the playability of all games, and let the struggle be with the puzzles, and not the interface.
Kevin Fox
The Unreal Tournament UI certainly pushed game UIs to a new level, with easy to access, well organized drop down menus. . If I had more time I would probably hack up enlightenment to make it work like that. Trbies 2 did a great job with taking the UT and Tribes interfaces and merging them in tabbed pages and pulldowns to produce one of the best, albeit somewhat complicated (Due only to all the cool features of the game.) menus anyone has ever made for anything.
EverQuest is another great example of game UI development. Their UI was damned lame at first, but over time has become fully customizable in regards to positioning, size, colors and transparency, all created from the input of hundreds of thousands of users.
What I really would like to see is a merging of the UT/Tribes style interface with EverQuest customizability, along with all of the keyboard manipulation provided in Maya, and of course, easy to design and implement themes.
If anyone wants any help designing a gui, feel free to shoot me a message...
Interaction with games or other software has always had fine people like JC trying to figure out how to build a better interface or control, as far back as electronic drafting boards or Sirius Joyport. Weird controls have come and gone to make the game "real" (steering wheels, vibrating chairs, better joy sticks, etc.) and eventually we find ourselves looking at new games or software which still rely on keyboards (one of the most infuriating devices for action games if you type like I do (9 thumbs and one hunt-and-peck finger)) or any of a series of non-standard devices. Probably the closest we came to one standard for input was back in the hay-days of Atari 2600 and C64 computers. (Yet, arcade games had buttons slap dashed around consoles which made Defender nearly impossible for me to pay, yet my hand-to-eye let me rule in Pacman)
The article doesn't delve much into why we keep flopping all over and re-discovering bad interfaces and controls, 20 years after these things became mainstream. Probably has less to do with the designer and consultant than it has with the actual market force of millions of buyers who never gave a thought beyond the package graphics.
So call me a skeptic.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Most game UIs are written with custom code, not huge object-oriented libraries. And they tend to be very usable and snappy on what amounts to low-end hardware (thinking of game consoles here). Compare this to any method of creating a UI for your favorite OS, whatever it may be. It is an order of magnitude easier to write a game-like UI from scratch than it is to learn to use any of the various UI toolkits, even if you already know those toolkits.
Along those lines, I am continually amazed when Windows XP (or the even a new KDE or whatever) requires significantly more CPU power than the previous version. Does handling clicks on widgets _really_ take that much processing power? We just blindly assume "oh yeah, context sensitive help, that's _gotta_ be expensive." But c'mon, these things could have been lightning fast on the Commodore 64.
...since every iteration of the Microsoft or Apple OS requires more RAM, a faster processor, and more colors on the monitor, I think it's more accurate to say that no one needs a new computer to do a spreadsheet program or Word document, provided they don't want to use the latest version.
And besides, there's more to a computer than just the processor and graphics card. I've got a three-year-old PowerMac clone sitting at home, and I can't hardly use it for anything new. It does its job fine, but all its hardware is legacy -- DIMMs, SCSI, and serial ports while everything else is moving to SDRAM, FireWire, and USB. This phenomenon exists in the PC world as well, just to a lesser degree. If I want to upgrade my machine, it's ironic that it will cost me more money than if I had a brand-new one with USB and SDRAM on the motherboard.
In other words, then: it also costs me more to make my machine compatible with a Palm handheld, a digital camera, a joystick, or a new printer, I need to spend the money to upgrade it first. If I want to do anything like digital video, I have to upgrade it a lot. Even downloaded Flash multimedia ran slow until I upgraded the processor, and I sure can't add an MP3 jukebox without a substantial hard drive upgrade (2 gigs doesn't go as far as it used to).
Games push the envelope harder than anything else in the consumer industry, true. But it's hardly the only thing. There's more to consumer PCs these days than video games and word processing, and it's all more demanding than it used to be.
The article brings up some good points about making things more real, but personally, it's no more real to me now that it was in the days of Coleco Vision. Final Fantasy X doesn't make me feel any more like I'm "in the game" than Final Fantasy I did. Graphics and presentation have obviously gotten better, but that's only made games nicer to look at, and hasn't made them any more real for me.
I'd like to hear people's comments on whether or not these graphics bring a sense of realism. I equate it to the change from say twm to GNOME/KDE, it's prettier, but it's not any more "real".
I don't know her personally, but I've never read anyhting from her that indicates intelligence.
Unless stating the obvious is now considered intelligent.
Is it supposed to be profound that she says games push computers? which, by the way, is not true. It may push PC's, but thats another story.
Like trying to quickly move through 5 terrabytes of data doesn't push computers, sheesh.
I can say this about her, she comes off as a competant VB programmer.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think the reason is simple though. Since games have such a short lifetime, the designers are always free to try radically new ideas. If it works out, great. If not, oh well, they can try something better the next time.
They also have users who don't mind and actually expect to start from square one, so games don't have as a design goal being as minimally invasive as possible upon the existing instincts of the user.
i came across an elegantly intuitive, yet powerful, extensible UI the other day at the mall. yep, in the Discovery Channel Store, hanging on the rack with all the other knicknacks and doojobbies, there it was.
in essence, it's a PIM for kids in the form factor of a keychain about the size of a stick of gum.
on one end (left) was the keyring, and a small button inset into the front next to the LCD screen - 3 lines by about 24-30 characters.
the other end was a large button that, when twisted one way, functioned to scroll up, the other way to scroll down. when pressed, the button performed an action (enter)
with these three simple functions and the mode switching of the small button at the left, it accomplished every function of a PIM - including giving me my horoscope and telling my fortune. i learned how to use it within the thirty or so seconds i was playing with it before i was distracted by the 76-in-one multitool on the next shelf over.
my point? did i have one?
oh yeah. more than a few developers can take a lesson from a $5 keychain that got it right with just two buttons.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
I personally think that games do really push the envelope on UI design. Take games like Black and White that use gesture based control. This would be a great ability in many pieces of real software. Imagine being able to trigger filters or switch drawing tools in photoshop by simply making quick gestures, the learning curve would be a draw back but it would be the same as hotkeys and key combinations, new users wouldnt be effected but power users would learn to use them and theyd become a natural efficiency booster.
This is just one good example of a UI feature used in a game that would be very useful in real software applications. Sure many games have stupid and unnatural interfaces, but many also have strong elements that could prove to be immensely useful in the future
Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind...
of occasions, I can attest to JC being smart.
Well, given your esteemed recommendation, we need no more convincing as to JC (who??)'s intelligence. If a Slashdot editor thinks someone is smart, hell, that should be good enough for all of us, huh ?
From the article - "Unless you are in a military installation, the most demanding application on any computer will be a game."
Naive bastard. On my system, the things that spank my processor aren't the games.
Games only push speed of the processor and the video card. That's it. Most games play off the CD, so they don't push the size of the hard drive. They could care less about your printer, scanner, or anything else like that. Most big software packages require more RAM than any game. I have 512MB at work not because I run games.
So Intel and AMD love games. I imagine RAM manufacturers like bloated office app developers, and bloated OS developers - MS springs to mind. CD player/recorder makers like musicians. Printer makers like business and old people who want a hard copy of everything. Scanner makers love the internet for wanting everyone to share their pictures.
So companies like HP could conceivably help their bottom line by supporting musicians, longevity drugs, and getting more people on the internet. How about that. Someone should tell Bruce Perens.
Both, to some degree. Most of the time, it's pretty transparent, and doesn't affect me much. On the other hand, when I want to get to a little-used function, it's a royal pain in the ass.
One other problem I can see with these is that someone who basically has the layout memorized may get crossed up by a menu item moving or disappearing as different features are used more or less.
The PalmPilot also makes good use of whole-screen applications.
But more to the point, let me ask how often most of you recall seeing an interview with a dignitary of the male persuasion where, say, two-thirds of the way through, the interviewer asks, "How about you, Rick? What are you 'up to' at the moment?" *wink-wink*
Doesn't this get on your fucking nerves? No, not that hot chicks' opinions are relevant, but rather that at first glance we're likely to agree! Don't agree with her? Hell, chances are she's probably not your type. If she's your type, she could be telling you how much better off we'd be with Leiberman as a VP and you'd fucking agree in a heartbeat.
Then, what do I know. I'm here late in the day on a Friday when I should be at happy hour looking for organic material to attempt gene mutations with. All I'm saying is, you could be half as smart and twice as rich if you were a hot chick. Call me misogynistic, stoned or whatever.
Well, there are both good and bad ways to use adaptive UI, just as with anything else in UI design. "Personalized menus" happens to be a example of one that's particularly annoying.
In addition to organizing commands into categories, menus already hide them away until they're needed; that's the whole point. Selective-display menus hide the commands even more and just add extra steps to get to them when they're needed. What's worse, the user has been learning to use the interface, and using a hidden command moves it to the "recently used" list. This adds it back to the truncated menu, often rearranging it so any benefit from learning the shortened version is now lost, and the user has to relearn or retrain muscle memory. I hate it too, and I always turn it off ("adapting" the UI in a way that works).
A better use of adaptive UI is not to change the layout or components out from under the user, but to look for patterns of usage and facilitate those. For example, if a user consistently follows action 'a' with actions 'g' and 'i', the adaptive UI could recognize this and ask politely if these should be combined into a single action, perhaps putting a button on the toolbar if a-g-i is frequently used. That's a pretty simple example, but it shows that adaptation isn't necessarily all bad.
Adaptive UI will probably develop like graphical UIs have in the past: by trial-and-error to see what works and what doesn't when you put it in front of the user. Most of it probably won't, probably because UIs are designed either by programmers who often have a hard time separating the internals of the program from the way it's used, or by marketing folks who think that more gimmicks, flash, and colors equals better.
It's my feel that adaptive UIs that complement rather than hinder both learning and experienced users are still off in the future (but maybe that's because I'm on my second read through The Diamond Age and thinking of the Primer).
Just my 2 1909-S VDBs,
Paul
Game designers know that clarity of interface is more important than the ability to sort a contact list by last letter of their middle name.
No.
Clarity of interface is nothng, if all it does is serve to illustrate that I cannot do what I want to do.
A balance must be struck between clarity, and utility.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Sadly, the company that made the product (ClearSpace) is no longer around. But it was a really well designed grapbics library and included a gesture-based command system - basically the system took some gesture the user performed and converted it into an int. It did a pretty good job of not really having many collisions and being tolerant of errors in the gesture.
For example, drawing a circle around something would zoom in. Drawing a line diagonally outward would zoom out, and "zorro"ing a graphic would remove it. You could tie any command to any gesture you liked though, and even build trainable interfaces that way.
I really liked the system and I'd like to see more things pick up gesture based systems.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
which is just short of the worst CRAP you can get on the market today. DELL/COMPAQ for examples use the lowest end equipment and OLDEST parts they can possibly get away with. We regularly have to bring the BIOS into this century, and often they will send special ordered SCSI3 drives with sub-par SCSI2 controllers, like you wont notice.
Win2k runs like a champ with Debian on my p2 450 with 196 mb.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Sims, from a UI standpoint, is very well designed. The buttons are nice and big, which means they're fast to access via Fitts law. The buttons appear in a pie-shaped fashion around the mouse pointer, which further increases access time (you don't have to go down a list of buttons button by button. The pie shape means that each button is adjacent to the mouse pointer).
;) ) Usability problems are not technology problems, they are people problems. The silicon based computer is not speaking the same protocol as the carbon-based one. The solution is not to add RAM and CPU cycles to the silicon computer, but get the silicon computer to speak the same protocol the carbon-based computer speaks.
A lot of idiots throw high-technology at usability problems. Especially all those people touting web based interfaces (and of course, we've never, ever seen a confusing, difficult-to-navigate web page, have we? None of those exist
GUI Bloopers author Jeff Johnson refers to this type of interface (or blooper, as he calls it) as a "TTY GUI". I think that description adequately fits the bill.
By the way, Tim. You are one of the smartest people who posts Slashdot. And I don't give props too often.