Blog 1 - UI Interaction Design ​

After the discussion on UI Interaction Design during Wednesday lecture, I got to thinking about how these ideas would fit into designing interfaces for games. My first thought was to look back on some of my favorite video games, and the main one that came to mind was one of the first games I ever played, Harvest Moon: Magical Melody. Seeing as it is part of the Harvest Moon series, the bulk of the gameplay revolves around planting crops, raising animals, mining for resources, befriending villagers, and building a life for yourself in a new town, and this particular game is available only on GameCube.

In Magical Melody, you play with a handheld controller, and the game does a fairly good job of displaying which buttons correspond to which actions using small bubbles in the shape and color of a button on the controller (i.e. green circle with an "A", grey ovalish shape with an "X") and icons to hint at the action (i.e. an icon of a tool you have equipped to indicate using it, a rucksack icon to indicate taking an item out of your inventory). All of this is kept neatly in the upper right corner of the screen, which is where those buttons are also located on the controller, which is a nice example of mapping; even though mapping is entirely unnecessary, it makes the design feel more elegant and intuitive. In the upper left corner, you can also find the date and time, which updates as you play, and your stamina, which depletes as you use tools and pick up items, which is neat in that it keeps all of the information that users might refer to repeatedly throughout gameplay in one place. Some commands are left to the player as an exercise, such as pressing "start" or the "Y" button to access different menus, but this can somewhat be justified by the fact that most games on the same platform (GameCube) use a similar convention to access main menus, and once a player finds the menu once, they will probably remember which button to press to find it again.

However, in some cases, the game not explaining everything can lead to confusion. One aspect I always found interesting in the Harvest Moon style of games is that the game gives you very little information about the actual extent of things you can do in gameplay. The introductory cutscene throws you into a new town and gives you some basic tools you can use to interact with the environment, but it is up to the player to discover what shops exist, new areas to mine, where to buy crops and animals, and so much more. Consequently, without an intuition or experience from playing similar games, a beginner player will probably spend much of their first few days floundering around randomly discovering things, and in some cases, you might not even know a whole skill or item existed until a few years into playing, and this happened to me. Specifically, I first played Magical Melody when I was six, maybe seven years old. I played for many years, then took a break in middle school before returning to it during high school when COVID hit, and it was only then, roughly a decade later, that I figured out you can chop down trees. Allow me to explain. A key resource in Magical Melody is wood, which is required in decent amounts to construct and upgrade buildings such as your house, barn, and coop. In the game, wood has three main forms: trees, stumps, and logs. When you use your axe on a log, it breaks instantly, giving you one wood. When you hit a tree with your axe, nothing happens--or at least, nothing happens until you hit it fifteen, maybe twenty times, after which it turns into a stump and a handful of logs. The same is true of stumps, which turn into wood after being chopped, except you might only need to hit ten to fifteen times, depending on how much you have upgraded the tool.

And so ten years after first starting to play the game and multiple in-game years later, I accidentally figured out one day that you can chop trees, and this is rather non-negligible because as a young child, I remember a major annoyance in playing Magical Melody was that I never had enough wood to upgrade my house or anything, and there is no other way to collect wood in the game. Thinking of this, I am suddenly reminded of Newton's Third Law. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Or in this case, I guess I am simply looking for any reaction. The key issue with chopping trees in Magical Melody was that when I hit a tree once, I had no indication that this did anything to the tree, and since there are other areas in the game where randomly using a tool does nothing, I had no reason to assume that hitting the tree again would be productive in any way. A simple asset change to make the tree look like it had a crack would probably have resolved this situation, but this one probably jus slipped past the developers. In any case, looking back on this reminds me how important it is to assume that users have no idea what capabilities are available in a technology and no intuition regarding what could happen. Moreover, making sure an interface mirrors the reality of the physical world (i.e. action: reaction), which we are all most familiar with, is a great starting point for showing users how an interface works. It's interesting to think about where else principles from physics or everyday life might be useful in game design or user interface designs in general, and I would be interested in exploring this further.

Lecture Notes (10/11) ​

• Easy to use: learnable, efficient, error-tolerant
• examples: Apple signature preview (yes/yes/yes), old car radio presets (no/yes/no), Dropbox deletion (yes, but might not mean what you think/yes/no)
• other metrics: pleasantness, safety
• when there are negative outcomes, there's a tendency to blame the user, but often times the cause is a bad design
• common areas of a bad design: medical tech UIs, security (many attacks take advantage of social engineering), etc.
• lessons: see slides (ease of use, pleasantness, safety, security, accessibility)
• fitt's law?? gestalt principle? (review slides)
• accelerators: allows user to increase the speed of completing an action (i.e. keyboard shortcuts, select checkboxes to aggregate actions, microwave +30 seconds button, etc.) so supports greater efficiency