Recent advantages in computer technology have significantly lowered the average prices for personal computing devices such as smartphones, tablet PCs and notebooks which led to the ever-increasing popularity of such devices. Eventually the popularity of electronic games has significantly increased which resulted in higher profits and higher competition in the gaming industry. Companies are struggling to make a successive game and ready to give live to the most weird ideas just to attract user’s attention (for example take famous “Plants vs. Zombies”). However, even if the game is based on an interesting idea and employs latest technical and visualization tools it may still fail if it has bad user interface. Indeed, interaction process with the player is in the core of any game and if this process fails the player will close the game and delete it forever. This article will try to cover the most important aspects of a good user interface which any game developer should consider.
Learnability and consistency
Learnability implies that any computer game interface should be designed in order to be welcome to the player who has launched the game for the first time. It is quite hard to imagine that user will read game manual before playing; on the contrary, the majority of people expect fun to start just after the game is launched. Therefore it is a very good idea to provide a short tutorial on the key elements of the interface of the game, especially if it is complicated as in many RPG games. This tutorial may take different forms (for example pop-up notifications) but for complicated UIs the best idea is to present the player with some of the key elements of the game from the start and then add new elements during the progress of the game. For example, in RPG game player may start with few inventory slots and only health indicator and later in the game process extended inventory and magic energy indicator will be added.
As long as player has learned some features of the game interface it is natural to expect that these features will be applied everywhere in the game. Therefore, the concept of consistency is closely related to the concept of learnability. It implies that user’s experience remain the same during the whole game process. In practice it means that all menus should have similar layouts and design. For example, different order of “Yes/No” buttons in different game menus will lead to numerous wrong clicks and awful user experience. Moreover, the concept of consistency applies to the whole genres of games. For example, the majority of first-person-shooter games on PC involve mouse to control the direction of view and millions of players got used to such pattern. Therefore, the FPS game where such this function is switched to the keyboard will receive lots of critics and almost surely will not become popular.
Simplicity and Efficiency
According to psychological research the maximum number of elements which average human …