Awesome Man and the Minimal Interface!

Near the end of my sophomore year of college, I was part of a three-man team working on a game called "Awesome Dude and the Maze of Doom." It was a short game, only one level long, for a game design course meant to teach us how to program for Flash Actionscript 3.0. I drew the short straw and became our programmer (the group consisted of two graphic designers and a business professor; none of us were, at the time, equipped to be programmers), and quickly began to teach myself Actionscript.  Of course, the program and language is going the way of the dodo, but that doesn't mean everything I learned is obsolete.

One of the enduring lessons I learned as part of the project was just how little information you can get away with giving a user. You see, we were faced with dilemma of teaching our player how to play a game that they'd only be playing for a few minutes at most (the "speed run" of the game clocked in at 0:52:23, a record I set, thank you very much). If the tutorial took too long, it would seem kind of silly in regard to the rest of the game; if the tutorial was too short, players might end up unsure of what to do. So, the three of us brainstormed and brainstormed, and did our research, until we worked out a short tutorial sequence to show the player everything Awesome Dude could do in around 10 seconds.

But of course, nothing ever goes as planned. I couldn't get the tutorial video to flow into the game properly, and our production schedule didn't leave much time to troubleshoot in that direction. So, we went back to the drawing board. We needed a way to teach players in-game, unobtrusively. What we came up with was not only a more interactive, but overall much more effective, method.

We used the up-to-that-point blank space behind the character, the "walls" of the maze, to show the players the controls as they needed to use them.

I'm not claiming this is an innovation; many flash games online use the same technology. It's just something we hadn't considered, since we had a lot to teach the players. We tried to keep everything as simple as possible; everything was depicted visually so players didn't need to process text. We tested extensively to see just how little we could get away with.

So, how does this relate to UI/UX? Well, the same principles apply. Ever since Awesome Dude, I've been of the philosophy that you should keep the "tutorial" aspect of your UI to a minimum; everything should be explanatory and intuitive. Icons should make sense. Pages should flow naturally. A good number of people might disagree with me, but I think that users are intelligent; if things make sense, they can figure it out with minimal effort. Sure, it takes a lot of testing and trial on the part of the UI designer, but it results in a better UI experience in the end.