Today I spent 45 minutes helping my father-in-law fix a problem that had been caused by a kludgy bit of UI design in Windows 7. It has so many options and buttons and ways to do things that it’s really easy for a naive user to do something that appears logical but actually causes real pain.
Years ago, I ran a computer games company and we produced one of the greatest PC games that you have never heard of: Azrael’s Tear (also on YouTube). I still get fan mail about this game every month or two, which is a lot considering how few people bought it. Happy few.
One of the problems with the game was a user interface which was hard to figure out. It meant that there was quite a steep learning curve early in the game. It was designed by expert gamers for expert games.
Last week I played the original Command and Conquer for the first time in 15 years. It was also a complex game but it had a very gentle learning curve and relied on user interface metaphors that people knew well, such as drag select.
It’s rare that people make really epic usability mistakes these days, either in games, applications or websites. (Although Flash intros and unmutable music on websites come close. See: Why are restaurant websites so awful?)
What actually happens is an accumulation of tiny epic fails. An accumulation of small design choices and over-complexity that causes real pain for users.
People – my technophobe wife included – love the iPhone because Apple added fewer of these little hiccups. (Although Jakob Nielsen disagrees.) Similarly, Basecamp has fewer moving parts but all of them are really nicely engineered to work well. Sometimes it’s not a choice between ‘less’ or ‘more’ but ‘less and more’. Less stuff, more quality.
I’m not going back into the games business (thank goodness) but I am starting up a new website venture and I must remember these lessons. Tiny epic design wins. No tiny epic usability fails.
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Excellent article. I especially liked:
> What actually happens is an accumulation of tiny epic fails. An
> accumulation of small design choices and over-complexity that
> causes real pain for users.
I’ve been turning this notion over quite a bit. It seems that the challenge is often being able to understand the difference between identifying all the little epic fails vs. just making a lot of noise about matters of opinion.
I think at some point you’ve got to float your loaf either directly to consumers (beta programs?) or through usability testing and let the people you want to be your consumers help you see and understand where your tiny epic fails truly are.
Fortunately a web venture affords you greater capability in this regard than you had publishing a game back in the day. You can identify and address your tiny fails much faster (and cheaper) than you could with shrinkwrap software before.
-Michael
ps: There appears to be a tiny usability fail in your commenting system:
1) I didn’t know that the comment was actually a live preview. At first I thought I butterfingered something and actually published an incomplete comment. Caused anxiety.
2) Preview functionality shows strange formatting with no clear indication as to why it’s wonky, and/or what I can do to fix. (Can furnish screen capture upon request).
What do you think? Noise or tiny fail? Would you hold back a release because of this?
-Michael
Thanks, Michael for the comment and the helpful feedback. The live preview is provided by a plugin which I didn’t write. I had feedback from another reader that they wanted some kind of live preview functionality and I hoped that this would be a workable solution but I agree that it could be confusing. I’ll disable it for the moment and investigate a more user-friendly alternative when I get some time.
On the wider point about launching something with known problems, you make a good argument. If you wait for software to be perfect before you launch, you’ll never get it out the door. I used to make computer games for a living and we would always plan to do a patch shortly after a release. There’s a huge difference between 2,500 hours of testing that we could do in house and hundreds of thousands of hours of real world play testing done by users.
I just installed Office 2010 and it’s really hard to see much improvement over 2007, despite a three year wait. Same with Windows Vista to Windows 7. But with online applications like Google Apps or Basecamp, you can see improvements happening on a much more regular basis. In the end, I think gradual evolution with user feedback will always beat infrequent revolution however intelligent the design is.
Cheers, Matthew
After wracking my brains to eek out the name of a game I had loved as a child, I finally found and re-played Azrael’s Tear to completion, in DosBox, on Mac no less. The choice to go 3d was a bold one, but all genres make this leap sooner or later. I would love nothing more than to see a re-hash of Azrael’s Tear based on the Unreal engine. It would look stunning, and play beautifully too. It stands, in my opinion, as a shining example of what adventure games could be if they were reborn. Oddly enough, it’s surprisingly detailed 3D world runs rings around the frustratingly static likes of Myst. And I would play Azrael’s Tear a hundred times over before I would ever manage to drag my way through Myst, masterpiece edition or otherwise.
I think in terms of Azrael’s Tear, it was very much a combination of tiny epic fails and an insurmountable weight of negative opinion. The game is only a couple of control tweaks away from true brilliance, and a faithful remake would do it great justice. Sure, the story was weird. But have you played Metal Gear Solid? Weird is good!
On a related note, whoever was responsible for the placement of the elevator in the dino pit should be answerable for their crimes.
I’m glad you enjoyed AT. I hear from people all over the place who enjoyed it – even today nearly 15 years later.
Matthew
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