6 ms·

What UX designers can learn from 1990s Japanese video games

degenerate 10y ago
I absolutely loathe 'modern' UX design, not only because it seems to get too out of the way most of the time, to the point where I am struggling to find out how to locate the damn interface to begin using it in the first place. I am the go-to tech guy in most friend/family circles as many of you are, and the 'hidden' modern UI interfaces become a compounded problem when I am trying to help people over the phone. Back in the day, when helping my family first use Chrome, I'd say "click the gear icon, in the top right" - and they would find it with near 100% accuracy. Now it doesn't matter what I say... "hamburger icon" (give me a break), "three stacked bars", "triple bars" - the settings menu is no longer iconic, and modern UX has become a verbal wasteland when trying to explain anything over the phone. "Hover over the little down triangle thing to the right, then the menu pops up" ... "swipe near the edge of your screen, not too far to the right though, just tap the very edge and the menu comes up" ... these kind of explanations should not need to exist if the UX was good. At least the old games you could walk your buddy through the selections over the phone.
- biofox 10y ago
  To add to this, I find modern UI design hinders exploration and experimentation, which is typically how people learn to interact with new objects. When options are hidden behind strange gestures, off-screen menus, and obscure icons, how are people ever suppose to find them without prior knowledge?
- agumonkey 10y ago
  After going through DOS, WIN3x, WIN9x, AQUA, ... I'm very fond of the early 90s model. WIN3, IRIX. I had deep lispiness before leading me to seek fully metacircular UIs with code as interface and interface as code (lisp machines, self, ST, node based Houdini/Shake) but nowadays, with a little more abstraction power grown by the years I really like the tiny GUIs I listed above. Todays GUIs are stuck in some uncandy valley, too much css, not enough value.
- tjl 10y ago
  I first saw the term hamburger menu several months back and I thought, "huh?" as I had no idea what it meant. I had to go search the net to find out that they meant those three stacked bars. Why not just call it that? It doesn't really look like a hamburger.
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    I had to do the same when I first heard it, a sure sign that the metaphor fails, and most of the search results were pieces explaining what a terrible idea it is. Just searched again, yep, nearly all the first page is why you should never implement it, along with BK and a stack exchange "what's the lined menu icon called". Better question, why not just stick with a GUI element that can be described succinctly? A gear perhaps.
    - csense 10y ago
      If the top Google results all tell you that you shouldn't do it, then why do so many people do it? In fact I'm writing this on Firefox, which has one of those things in the browser UI...
  - eru 10y ago
    Hamburger menu is a good short-hand when talking about UI with someone who already knows the terms. Similar to lots of other technical or jargon terms, it's not a good description for a (new) user.
- kagamine 10y ago
  I think it went sideways when developers abandoned the menu bar accross the top of the screen like all OS X apps have, and all windows apps used to have, but are now hidden from view). I think this was replaced by icons because translation into other languages was difficult with the tools of the time, and is difficult now because even with web technologies like Angular and PoEdit making the tools side of things easy you still need someone who understands the language to do the translation. So text translations got dumped for icons, and oftentimes the icons are terrible (like the hamburger menu which is just awful imo).
  - tracker1 10y ago
    The hamburger menu icon is about as old as GUI based interfaces[1]. That said, it's about time and context... knowing and having the website's logo in the top left actually be a link to the homepage and getting people to understand that took a bit of time. Also, the phone icon is probably the worst example today... most people born after 1985 have never seen a phone that even resembles the common icon/glyph (I'm a bit older than that, but still). I do feel that the swipe from the side menus are really unintuitive, and better left tethered to an on-screen (even if it scrolls off) button/icon in addition to swipe interaction, at least until it becomes very common. A lot of the changes are because of size constrained devices, and a return to the concept that someone can only really see or think about a few things at a time. Then again, using OSX, Windows and Linux UIs on a regular bases, along with differences in apps that are cross platform, I may be too lenient of a judge here. [1] https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/ https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/
ZenoArrow 10y ago
I know the article was talking about broad design cues, but there was one specific menu design from that era that I thought was fairly good, the ring menu system Secret of Mana. This clip from Secret of Evermore (same developers, different series) shows the ring menu system: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0aYoUGmW_q0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0aYoUGmW_q0 Also, slightly off-topic but I'm not sure the article it mentions about Minesweeper being designed to teach people how to use GUIs is accurate, though it could have been an unintended consequence. IIRC Minesweeper was written by a Microsoft intern, I'll try to find the Reddit thread where the author discussed the story behind its development.
- feral 10y ago
  > (same developers, different series) It doesn't affect your point, but Secret of Evermore was actually very unusual in that was developed by an American team.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    Thanks for the tip, that is unusual, I can think of one or two JRPG-style games made in the West, but no others for the SNES (though thinking about it, were there any Western developers involved in Earthbound or was that fully made in Japan?). With the other point I raised, couldn't find something from the Minesweeper dev but did find something from the Solitaire dev. When asked about whether these games were included by Microsoft to help learn how to use Windows he said... "A post hoc fallacy, I think." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zfadv/til_that_microsoft_solitaire_was_developed_by_a/cylzb2x https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zfadv/til_t...
- dota_fanatic 10y ago
  I rather liked the ring menu system; one could go through the various menus quite quickly, (and with pleasant, contextually matched sound effects!) It's similar to the speed one can reach using keyboard shortcuts, but it could never be popular with pc or mobile since mouse / touch cant adopt it well, and those are the methods of input most catered to. I like to imagine a world where Secret of Evermore did well, financially. It doesn't help that it followed in the footsteps of Chrono Trigger earlier in the year, Final Fantasy 6 the year before that, and then one more year for its spiritual predecessor, Secret of Mana. The bar was so high! Part of its lack of success, though, was a pretty broken combat system (unbalanced), and a poorly implemented "search here" command, which rendered the player needing to swing their weapon spastically when trying to find hidden items. A cool feature with poor UX really hurt that game. Still, SoE had some really great art, and a decent story. What a great first entry into his professional career for Jeremy Soule (composer), as a teenager just out of high school. Who needs college when there's opportunities available like that? ;)
parski 10y ago
This is crazy timing. I'm playing Chrono Trigger right now and the thing that struck me as fantastic UX this playthrough is that Crono shakes his head when you're trying to go somewhere you can't. I found it particularly useful when walking on the beams in the Arris Dome. It maps pretty well to the design pattern of shaking prompts when entering invalid input such as an incorrect password.
feral 10y ago
Couple of nit-pics: > you come across a small, glowing light — something that’ll entice any gamer in search of loot That small glowing light is not a UI element to highlight the tutorial – instead, it's what a 'save point' always looks like in that game. It just so happens that the first time you interact with a save point, you get a tutorial (the same as the first time you interact with several other game mechanics, which don't look like glowing lights.) So that goes against the author's thesis a little bit - arguably they are misinterpreting the SNES UI in the context of their modern experience. >Chrono Trigger is one of the few SNES RPGs I’ve played where poking around mundane rooms pays off. Poking around mundane rooms in order to get rewards is almost a trope in SNES RPGs - Final Fantasy in particular was full of "secrets" you could find. In fact, this reminds me of a criticism of game UI (Ernest Adams, maybe?) which is that its not obvious that you have to shoot crates in order to get health, or try to interact with not obviously interactive elements of the game world for hidden rewards. Experienced players quickly find these things by shooting everything and trying to interact with everything, because they are familiar with the trope from other games, but it makes the game less accessible to newcomers - arguably bad UX.
- golergka 10y ago
  In a game, finding out how mechanics work and what you can do is exploration. Figuring out that you can combine a certain action with a certain object to get a new result is exciting and interesting. When you got the whole game figured out, know how everything works and what to expect — isn't that the point where you abandon it?
  - clevernickname 10y ago
    That's half, the other is execution. Even if you know all of the tricks to a competitive game, you can always improve, just like with a sport. Different strokes. Some people just can't handle action games and get very frustrated at them, and prefer genres with no action at all that they can handle at their own pace. Others have to have their hand constantly held and can't be expected to figure anything out for themselves, but they're willing to dump hundreds or thousands of hours into multiplayer.
  - 10y ago
CM30 10y ago
How about another one? Simple design that teaches people how to use it through doing stuff rather than forced tutorials. Old school Mario games were great here, the level design basically taught you how to play the game without as much as a message box in sight. Unfortunately, a lot of modern apps seem to be some overly confusing mess that try to rectify UX design issues by use of tutorials and pop ups and arrows and what not, rather than simplifying things so people can figure them out on their own.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  new school mario is even better. I bet you saw this http://www.dorkly.com/post/73379/this-guy-makes-a-good-case-for-the-impressive-level-design-of-super-mario-3d-world http://www.dorkly.com/post/73379/this-guy-makes-a-good-case-... in case you haven't enjoy the ride.
  - CM30 10y ago
    Yep, saw that video. It's a good overview of how the level design in Super Mario 3D World works, and well worth watching for anyone interested in designing good games. I mostly only mentioned old school because of my disappointment with Mario Galaxy 2 and the 'tutorial disc', which was one of the most pointless additions ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbDLuDRgnkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbDLuDRgnkM Still, least it made for a funny parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rD5AskvHWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rD5AskvHWc
- eru 10y ago
  There was a discussion about old school Mario on Hacker News a while back. It teaches you everything you need to know. It doesn't teach you about the run-button; and some people never found out about it. (And to the designers credit, you never need the run button in any part of the game to finish it.)
dclowd9901 10y ago
As an example of startlingly good UX in Japanese RPGs, I point to the modern persona games, which somehow manage the thankless feat of providing copious amounts of information, but always in a very useful way, as well as helping clear away the mundanities of the game (remembering enemy weakspots and such)
- eru 10y ago
  We can also learn from boardgames. The technology is mostly cardboard, though. For example Eclipse manages to make the huge amount of bookkeeping in the game bearable with some very clever 'UI' on the player mats. (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/72125/eclipse https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/72125/eclipse) Though for the really good designs you don't even notice the UI and bookkeeping any more. For example: auctions are a tempting design choice when making a game, since they automatically balance the price of good and bad options available. But, they take comparatively long to resolve---so distract from the core of the game (unless it's specifically an auction game) Instead some games introduce new options with a heavy mark-up and lower their price every turn. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction)
arcticgeek 10y ago
All your base are belong to us
ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago
Contrary to what the article says I think kids/people did read the instruction manuals back then. Some old games didn't have certain super moves mentioned in the game at all. That probably allowed UX design to be terrible in places.

I absolutely loathe 'modern' UX design, not only because it seems to get too out of the way most of the time, to the point where I am struggling to find out how to locate the damn interface to begin using it in the first place. I am the go-to tech guy in most friend/family circles as many of you are, and the 'hidden' modern UI interfaces become a compounded problem when I am trying to help people over the phone. Back in the day, when helping my family first use Chrome, I'd say "click the gear icon, in the top right" - and they would find it with near 100% accuracy. Now it doesn't matter what I say... "hamburger icon" (give me a break), "three stacked bars", "triple bars" - the settings menu is no longer iconic, and modern UX has become a verbal wasteland when trying to explain anything over the phone. "Hover over the little down triangle thing to the right, then the menu pops up" ... "swipe near the edge of your screen, not too far to the right though, just tap the very edge and the menu comes up" ... these kind of explanations should not need to exist if the UX was good. At least the old games you could walk your buddy through the selections over the phone.

biofox 10y ago
To add to this, I find modern UI design hinders exploration and experimentation, which is typically how people learn to interact with new objects. When options are hidden behind strange gestures, off-screen menus, and obscure icons, how are people ever suppose to find them without prior knowledge?
agumonkey 10y ago
After going through DOS, WIN3x, WIN9x, AQUA, ... I'm very fond of the early 90s model. WIN3, IRIX. I had deep lispiness before leading me to seek fully metacircular UIs with code as interface and interface as code (lisp machines, self, ST, node based Houdini/Shake) but nowadays, with a little more abstraction power grown by the years I really like the tiny GUIs I listed above. Todays GUIs are stuck in some uncandy valley, too much css, not enough value.
tjl 10y ago
I first saw the term hamburger menu several months back and I thought, "huh?" as I had no idea what it meant. I had to go search the net to find out that they meant those three stacked bars. Why not just call it that? It doesn't really look like a hamburger.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  I had to do the same when I first heard it, a sure sign that the metaphor fails, and most of the search results were pieces explaining what a terrible idea it is. Just searched again, yep, nearly all the first page is why you should never implement it, along with BK and a stack exchange "what's the lined menu icon called". Better question, why not just stick with a GUI element that can be described succinctly? A gear perhaps.
  - csense 10y ago
    If the top Google results all tell you that you shouldn't do it, then why do so many people do it? In fact I'm writing this on Firefox, which has one of those things in the browser UI...
- eru 10y ago
  Hamburger menu is a good short-hand when talking about UI with someone who already knows the terms. Similar to lots of other technical or jargon terms, it's not a good description for a (new) user.
kagamine 10y ago
I think it went sideways when developers abandoned the menu bar accross the top of the screen like all OS X apps have, and all windows apps used to have, but are now hidden from view). I think this was replaced by icons because translation into other languages was difficult with the tools of the time, and is difficult now because even with web technologies like Angular and PoEdit making the tools side of things easy you still need someone who understands the language to do the translation. So text translations got dumped for icons, and oftentimes the icons are terrible (like the hamburger menu which is just awful imo).
- tracker1 10y ago
  The hamburger menu icon is about as old as GUI based interfaces[1]. That said, it's about time and context... knowing and having the website's logo in the top left actually be a link to the homepage and getting people to understand that took a bit of time. Also, the phone icon is probably the worst example today... most people born after 1985 have never seen a phone that even resembles the common icon/glyph (I'm a bit older than that, but still). I do feel that the swipe from the side menus are really unintuitive, and better left tethered to an on-screen (even if it scrolls off) button/icon in addition to swipe interaction, at least until it becomes very common. A lot of the changes are because of size constrained devices, and a return to the concept that someone can only really see or think about a few things at a time. Then again, using OSX, Windows and Linux UIs on a regular bases, along with differences in apps that are cross platform, I may be too lenient of a judge here. [1] https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/ https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/

ZenoArrow 10y ago

I know the article was talking about broad design cues, but there was one specific menu design from that era that I thought was fairly good, the ring menu system Secret of Mana. This clip from Secret of Evermore (same developers, different series) shows the ring menu system: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0aYoUGmW_q0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0aYoUGmW_q0 Also, slightly off-topic but I'm not sure the article it mentions about Minesweeper being designed to teach people how to use GUIs is accurate, though it could have been an unintended consequence. IIRC Minesweeper was written by a Microsoft intern, I'll try to find the Reddit thread where the author discussed the story behind its development.

feral 10y ago
> (same developers, different series) It doesn't affect your point, but Secret of Evermore was actually very unusual in that was developed by an American team.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  Thanks for the tip, that is unusual, I can think of one or two JRPG-style games made in the West, but no others for the SNES (though thinking about it, were there any Western developers involved in Earthbound or was that fully made in Japan?). With the other point I raised, couldn't find something from the Minesweeper dev but did find something from the Solitaire dev. When asked about whether these games were included by Microsoft to help learn how to use Windows he said... "A post hoc fallacy, I think." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zfadv/til_that_microsoft_solitaire_was_developed_by_a/cylzb2x https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zfadv/til_t...
dota_fanatic 10y ago
I rather liked the ring menu system; one could go through the various menus quite quickly, (and with pleasant, contextually matched sound effects!) It's similar to the speed one can reach using keyboard shortcuts, but it could never be popular with pc or mobile since mouse / touch cant adopt it well, and those are the methods of input most catered to. I like to imagine a world where Secret of Evermore did well, financially. It doesn't help that it followed in the footsteps of Chrono Trigger earlier in the year, Final Fantasy 6 the year before that, and then one more year for its spiritual predecessor, Secret of Mana. The bar was so high! Part of its lack of success, though, was a pretty broken combat system (unbalanced), and a poorly implemented "search here" command, which rendered the player needing to swing their weapon spastically when trying to find hidden items. A cool feature with poor UX really hurt that game. Still, SoE had some really great art, and a decent story. What a great first entry into his professional career for Jeremy Soule (composer), as a teenager just out of high school. Who needs college when there's opportunities available like that? ;)

parski 10y ago

This is crazy timing. I'm playing Chrono Trigger right now and the thing that struck me as fantastic UX this playthrough is that Crono shakes his head when you're trying to go somewhere you can't. I found it particularly useful when walking on the beams in the Arris Dome. It maps pretty well to the design pattern of shaking prompts when entering invalid input such as an incorrect password.

feral 10y ago

Couple of nit-pics: > you come across a small, glowing light — something that’ll entice any gamer in search of loot That small glowing light is not a UI element to highlight the tutorial – instead, it's what a 'save point' always looks like in that game. It just so happens that the first time you interact with a save point, you get a tutorial (the same as the first time you interact with several other game mechanics, which don't look like glowing lights.) So that goes against the author's thesis a little bit - arguably they are misinterpreting the SNES UI in the context of their modern experience. >Chrono Trigger is one of the few SNES RPGs I’ve played where poking around mundane rooms pays off. Poking around mundane rooms in order to get rewards is almost a trope in SNES RPGs - Final Fantasy in particular was full of "secrets" you could find. In fact, this reminds me of a criticism of game UI (Ernest Adams, maybe?) which is that its not obvious that you have to shoot crates in order to get health, or try to interact with not obviously interactive elements of the game world for hidden rewards. Experienced players quickly find these things by shooting everything and trying to interact with everything, because they are familiar with the trope from other games, but it makes the game less accessible to newcomers - arguably bad UX.

golergka 10y ago
In a game, finding out how mechanics work and what you can do is exploration. Figuring out that you can combine a certain action with a certain object to get a new result is exciting and interesting. When you got the whole game figured out, know how everything works and what to expect — isn't that the point where you abandon it?
- clevernickname 10y ago
  That's half, the other is execution. Even if you know all of the tricks to a competitive game, you can always improve, just like with a sport. Different strokes. Some people just can't handle action games and get very frustrated at them, and prefer genres with no action at all that they can handle at their own pace. Others have to have their hand constantly held and can't be expected to figure anything out for themselves, but they're willing to dump hundreds or thousands of hours into multiplayer.
- 10y ago

CM30 10y ago

How about another one? Simple design that teaches people how to use it through doing stuff rather than forced tutorials. Old school Mario games were great here, the level design basically taught you how to play the game without as much as a message box in sight. Unfortunately, a lot of modern apps seem to be some overly confusing mess that try to rectify UX design issues by use of tutorials and pop ups and arrows and what not, rather than simplifying things so people can figure them out on their own.

agumonkey 10y ago
new school mario is even better. I bet you saw this http://www.dorkly.com/post/73379/this-guy-makes-a-good-case-for-the-impressive-level-design-of-super-mario-3d-world http://www.dorkly.com/post/73379/this-guy-makes-a-good-case-... in case you haven't enjoy the ride.
- CM30 10y ago
  Yep, saw that video. It's a good overview of how the level design in Super Mario 3D World works, and well worth watching for anyone interested in designing good games. I mostly only mentioned old school because of my disappointment with Mario Galaxy 2 and the 'tutorial disc', which was one of the most pointless additions ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbDLuDRgnkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbDLuDRgnkM Still, least it made for a funny parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rD5AskvHWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rD5AskvHWc
eru 10y ago
There was a discussion about old school Mario on Hacker News a while back. It teaches you everything you need to know. It doesn't teach you about the run-button; and some people never found out about it. (And to the designers credit, you never need the run button in any part of the game to finish it.)

dclowd9901 10y ago

As an example of startlingly good UX in Japanese RPGs, I point to the modern persona games, which somehow manage the thankless feat of providing copious amounts of information, but always in a very useful way, as well as helping clear away the mundanities of the game (remembering enemy weakspots and such)

eru 10y ago
We can also learn from boardgames. The technology is mostly cardboard, though. For example Eclipse manages to make the huge amount of bookkeeping in the game bearable with some very clever 'UI' on the player mats. (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/72125/eclipse https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/72125/eclipse) Though for the really good designs you don't even notice the UI and bookkeeping any more. For example: auctions are a tempting design choice when making a game, since they automatically balance the price of good and bad options available. But, they take comparatively long to resolve---so distract from the core of the game (unless it's specifically an auction game) Instead some games introduce new options with a heavy mark-up and lower their price every turn. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction)

arcticgeek 10y ago

All your base are belong to us

ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago

Contrary to what the article says I think kids/people did read the instruction manuals back then. Some old games didn't have certain super moves mentioned in the game at all. That probably allowed UX design to be terrible in places.