10 ms·

The most interesting part of this to me is the UX feedback from the comments here. Many people, myself included, say they had no idea at first that the photos

• rootusrootus 3y ago
  Yep. I was distracted by the pretty colors I guess, because I made exactly the same error. Got a little frustrated and couldn't see the attraction of the game until I saw in the comments that all the pictures are in the same location.
• mike_hock 3y ago
  Oh, I didn't even realize that until I read your comment. I got a lucky first guess and thought "wow, I'm good at this," and then they just kept getting worse, lol. I guess it's because that information is dropped at the wrong time, because right after that you first have to spend time on figuring out how the weird UI works so you can actually make your guess. Why does the map have to be hidden behind a button, and why does it have to cover the picture? There is so much wasted space on the screen, why not use it to show both at the same time?
  • bhaney 3y ago
    The siren song of a mobile-first UI
    • ryandrake 3y ago
      The UI is pretty bad. I have a nice 27" monitor, yet they constrain the entire game to a tiny 5" wide column down the length of my browser window. Would be great if web designers would stop imagining that I'm browsing the web with a tiny portrait phone screen.
      • actionfromafar 3y ago
        They just stopped imagining that I’m browsing on a 15” screen!
      • NeoTar 3y ago
        But conversely, if you are designing a website where I will likely need to consult information or enter information whilst also using another site, it'd be great if your site could be accessed in a 'tall-and-thin' format. One of the most effective ways I have found to work is having windows open on the same monitor next to each other in a vertical tiling - almost as if they were two physical documents.
  • smaudet 3y ago
    I have a context for a fair number of mobile games. The UI felt fairly intuitive to me. Was it great? No. But I also didn't have to spend any time figuring anything put. Context matters the most.
  • chayesfss 3y ago
    [dead]
• bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
  The issue is they're clearly not all from the same place, so the instruction can't really register. They were all taken within a few hundred feet of each other, but that doesn't mean they were taken from the same place. In today’s one was aerial while another was indoors — not the same place! The instructions would be better if they read “the five photos were taken at different times, but were all taken within a few hundred feet of each other”.
  • ryaneager 3y ago
    Or “the five photos were all taken in the same town/city”. Now I know the scale I’m looking for.
  • postmodest 3y ago
    Two of today's photos are from OUTSIDE the final "0 miles" radius.
  • wolfram74 3y ago
    I dunno, they were taken at different times too, so none of them were within thousands of miles of each other relative to the galactic core. So that sentence is clearly not true either. "from the same place", place ~ region or as easily place ~ tripod position. Brevity and clarity are in tension with each other. Gotta decide where on the pareto front you want to be.
  • pneumonic 3y ago
    The instructions do say: > Each day, a random location is generated, along with five photos within five miles. So the pictures are all within 53,000 feet of each other (10 miles). Note that the random location is just some point, and probably not in a town or city.
• drsopp 3y ago
  My phone does not show those instructions. Firefox on iPhone mini 12.
  • tuxone 3y ago
    Instructions do not show up again after the first visit. Try with incognito mode.
    • drsopp 3y ago
      You are correct.
• dfxm12 3y ago
  Place does have many meanings, and in the context of playing a game, there's always room for playing with stuff like that. They could be taken from the exact same geographical coordinates, the same city, the same state. The photos could've all been grabbed from the same website or the place could've been "by a river", whether that's the Monongahela River or the Colorado River.
• anonu 3y ago
  OTOH I understood the instructions immediately. This is a fundamental issue in UX. Some users will know right away and others will not. Maybe a better sentence structure? Maybe something like "Guess the 1 location where all these photos were taken" (?) From my experience, most people don't read the instructions or text notes anyway. So its possible that an even better UX is one where the user figures out what they can do through intuition rather than reading.
  • ethbr0 3y ago
    > From my experience, most people don't read the instructions or text notes anyway. This fascinated me ~90s computer gaming. There were clear camps of "people who always read the manual" and "people who never never read the manual."
    • allannienhuis 3y ago
      for some, reading the manual was also fun. For most, reading the manual was an admission of failure.
      • TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Manuals in the 90s were sometimes actually fun. I still occasionally reminisce about that time in primary school, when one of the classmates bought (well, his parents did, I suppose) an original, boxed copy of StarCraft. He used to briefly lend the CD, and at some point copies of the CD started circulating, and he would just share the CD key with a few people - but in between, he lent me the manual. I think I was the only one who really cared about it. I've had it for months, I think. Read it cover to cover more times than I could count. Pretty much memorized every bit of lore and trivia there was in it - and there was quite a lot. The manual itself was a small booklet, with a couple pages of backstory for each of the playable species, plus a lot of extra world-building details about individual units, buildings and planets. So even as I didn't have access to the game, my own imagination built a whole world and infinite stories out of what some would consider "filler content". But this filler content made me care, and eventually shell out my pocket money for Brood War, and later on, money from my first full-time job on the collector's edition of StarCraft II. That SC manual came probably at the tail end of the era where the publishers put any kind of effort into manuals. Case in point: SC:BW came with just a tiny booklet with about equal split between lore/context, instructions for the new and changed game aspects, and legal/credits. SC II came... well, I don't know with, by that time Blizzard stopped caring about the game story anyway. (Oh, and speaking of warm memories of computer manuals in the 90s, I have a special place in my heart for the big, heavy, couple hundred pages long manual to Word 6.0 (not 100% sure about the exact version), and earlier, for the interactive self-training application that came included with Windows 3.11 - that one taught me how to use the mouse!)
• supportengineer 3y ago
  Because there were five guesses, I thought they would be five different photos from five different geographic locations
  • steezeburger 3y ago
    Wordle is similar though and doesn't seem to suffer from this ambiguity. Is it because the ui feedback from Wordle makes it more clear you're guessing the same word? I thought it was pretty clear here with the distance.
    • sio8ohPi 3y ago
      Obviously Wordle is uninteresting if you're only allowed one guess. This game reminds me very much of chronophoto (https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html), which prompts with photos from different years, and so I was expecting it to work more like that.
• stronglikedan 3y ago
  You think that's bad. I guessed in three, after realizing the first two photos had the name of the town in them!
• nneonneo 3y ago
  If you click the question mark, you get the help page which clarifies the data used: > ~500,000 geo-tagged images from Wikimedia Commons. Each day, a random location is generated, along with five photos within five miles. In a remote area, there will likely only be a few notable landmarks nearby so you can expect to see many pictures of a single landmark. This might be why people think the pictures are supposed to of the same place.
• pozdnyshev 3y ago
  [dead]
• murat124 3y ago
  Same boat, but lucky me I got 55 miles on the 4th photo. 5th one was 2200 miles off though.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• kylec 3y ago
  I got 19 miles away with my first guess, the map zoomed in and I thought "that's a weird bug", zoomed it out, and then proceeded to guess other guesses that were hundreds of miles away. Interesting concept, but poorly communicated.
  • tasuki 3y ago
    > Interesting concept, but poorly communicated. It was communicated in the very first sentence of the instructions. It's just that both you and me failed to read the instructions. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
    • actionfromafar 3y ago
      This feels like morality vs outcomes reasoning. “Morally”, no we don’t. (Me included.) Say, if you are a games designer and want to get the message across, then you can start A/B testing ways to get your point (pun mostly not intended) across more effectively.
      • TeMPOraL 3y ago
        One of the major ways this point is driven home in real life is through... letting the person fail in their task, suffer the consequences, and hopefully remember to read the goddamn manual the next time. Of course then there's a failure mode of e.g. bureaucracy, where people know everything is in the "manual" somewhere, they just don't trust themselves to understand it.
        • kylec 3y ago
          In this case though it's "you failed! try again tomorrow!" (because it's a daily thing). The odds I'm gonna come back tomorrow are extremely low though.
      • kylec 3y ago
        I feel something like "OK, you made your first guess, now try to get even closer! Here's another image" would have been helpful.
• duxup 3y ago
  I regularly get requests to put text or a warning on a page that’s already there. People just aren’t good with words and will come up with all sorts of reasons they didn’t see it. That’s not to say I’m any better, just that I get to see all the requests and excuses. Bolder, bigger, alerts, doesn’t matter.
  • Yizahi 3y ago
    Sometimes location and/or formatting is either bad or goes against "common convention". For example here on HN there is a mostly ok search build in. I had found it only after several years of using the site, and if I had to search for something before that, I've used google/ddg with "site:" option. Why? I guess because in 99% of all sites search is at the header, and footer contains zero useful information. I was trained that there is nothing there and so I've quite literally "didn't see" search box for a long time.
• eagleinparadise 3y ago
  My first guess was 19 miles away and I totally thought they were in 5 different locations. I had lived in Pittsburgh for a short time and knew exactly those iron bridges were probably WV/Pittsburgh area.
  • gwillen 3y ago
    Hah, yes, I had the exact same reaction. "Looks like Pittsburgh, but not quite. Also kind of looks like Virginia... let's split the difference."
  • shusaku 3y ago
    My film watching history had me 100% convinced it was Madison County.
• fatnoah 3y ago
  I read this post, then read the instructions, and still forgot the second photo was the same location as the first.
• wyldfire 3y ago
  I started to suspect that it was the same location after the third photo. Not that the photographs themselves seemed related but that the challenge didn't feel like a cohesive "game" unless the distance was a hint (and not a score on the single attempt).
• hoistbypetard 3y ago
  Wow. Yes. Same here.
• tuxone 3y ago
  I see it as a combination of distraction and being eager to consume something. Everything in the page (and before that, in the link title) screams “this is a game” yet Start was pressed without reading the 33-words down the bold How to play. A U issue more than UX.
• Anon4Now 3y ago
  My problem was the state lines. My first guess was somewhere in West Virginia, which happened to be right, but being from the west coast, I had trouble eyeballing where to click for West Virginia. The game is great, but I'm shouting to the wind about the decline in quality of online maps. For example, I can barely see roads on Google maps any more. The lines are faint and low contrast. Zooming in doesn't help because the font remains tiny. Map makers hate middle-aged people.
  • chrisco255 3y ago
    If you pinch to zoom on the map the state lines show, qnd even city names start to show. But you have to zoom more than you would think.
  • seabass-labrax 3y ago
    Google Maps is also really prejudiced against railways! Maps by the Ordnance Survey (the national cartography agency of Britain) have railways indicated by a solid, thick black line - more prominent than most roads. Google Maps shows railways less visibly than a footpath!
  • kilolima 3y ago
    Google maps is a crime against cartography. The two most important elements of a map are usually absent: a north arrow and a scale.
• scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
  I do UX research for a complex simulation training device. We record and catalogue dozens of hours of video. You would be amazed how many users miss key information presented to them. You’d think you can plan and predict, but they always manage to find a new and surprising way to just not get stuff. UX testing on simplest grittiest prototypes yields the best results in my experience. The more work you put into it before showing it to users, the more irritated you will be.
  • timeon 3y ago
    Lot of us do not read instructions. Especially if it is first thing presented.
    • scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
      What we’re working on is more than that - it’s an interactive hardware/software device with game-mechanics. Users’ attentions shift and come in and out of focus as they become acquainted with it. There are moments when they will read an instruction, and there are moments when they will miss it.
• outsidetheparty 3y ago
  Count me as one more person who did not realize this until after playing the full game and then coming back here to read the comments. One more arrow in the quiver of "users don't read"
• xerxesaa 3y ago
  One problem is that the instructions are not visible until you click on the question mark icon (at least on mobile) so I didn't even realize there were instructions until I read your comment.
• MetaMalone 3y ago
  FWIW this made sense to me right away
• atleastoptimal 3y ago
  An option would be to change the name so it communicates the goal as clearly as possible. People read it and interpret "this" as referring to a specific photo, not that the photos come from the same place.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• stephen_g 3y ago
  Ah, that explains why it only showed one flag at the end - I was thinking, "but where were all the other photos from?" I totally missed that information! Maybe if I hadn't played things like Geoguesser and was expecting it to work the same way, I would have read it a bit more carefully.
• bmitc 3y ago
  I think it's that software engineers don't know how to read what they don't write, that being instructions and documentation. I am making an assumption here on the category of those complianing about the UX, but I doubt it is far off.
• glonq 3y ago
  yeah i also presumed that it was different locations, like geoguessr