Throughout this last chapter, co-written with Amélie Beaudroit, User Experience Researcher at Airbus, we will discuss user interface (UI) design, user experience (UX), and usability.
We will illustrate concepts with images and screenshots to make sure every aspect is well understood. This chapter will cover the following topics:
- Definitions for user experience, personas, usability, and flow
- Heuristics: guidance, prompting, feedback, workload, brevity, adaptability, error management, consistency, and more
- Testing advice for your game, what and when to test, and vertical slices
- Preparing usability tests
- Inviting players, preparing the test environment, and more
- Taking notes, prioritizing, and more
By the end of this chapter, you will have enough knowledge to design usable user interfaces and understand how they can be tested so that they don't negatively impact the user experience.
Abstraction has become the rule in our society. The complexity of the world we live in and the obligation to deal with a huge amount of information has made abstraction a necessity to understand and interact with the situations we evolve in.
In order to cope with reality, the adult in a situation of change will fashion models to represent the required aspects to guide him and make his decisions.
However, in some contexts, abstraction has made some things lose their interest and their notion of reality, reducing the experience to a bunch of pre-analyzed data ready to feed into your brain.
The role of the Graphic User Interface (GUI) in games is to present the player with data that is easy to interpret so that he can have an up-to-date mental model of his character's or the game's situation.
Games abstract reality to focus on certain aspects only. The role of the game designer and the user experience designer is to decide which data must be given to the player and which should remain hidden.
Video games require constant attention and interaction; therefore, when designing a game and its GUI, it is important to consider usability issues to ensure that the player's cognitive resources are not misdirected.