Digital Design Blog

Video Game Design Lessons Should Apply To Web Site Design: Here’s Where To Start

I’ve long been interested in how game design (console, PC and online games) could influence and inform web site design, and for that matter all forms of digital design. Games are a $12.5 billion dollar market (NPD Group 2006) and players dedicate months of their lives to beating them.

Games like Halo 3, World of Warcraft and Madden are exquisitely designed, immersive experiences. They generate an emotional response. They seduce the user to suspend their disbelief. Even Wii games, with their simple often abstract graphics, explore audio and spatial cues, customization, transitions and animations much more than the most sophisticated web sites.

One aspect of usability that has always been front of mind in game design is learnability. With web site design we talk about learnability curves and the aim of making that curve as flat as possible for infrequent site visitors. If it takes too long to learn how to use a site, and a user is not compelled to use the site for their job or otherwise, then they’ll simply substitute it with another.

With games, part of the fun is encountering a challenge and learning how to overcome it. Balancing play so that the gamer discovers what they can do and what they’re supposed to do is an art and a science. The gamer has to try a whole bunch of different approaches to find success: using different combinations on your keyboard or controller, following different routes, attempting a variety of interactions. Sometimes these attempts have serious consequences (e.g. your character dies) and sometimes the game allows you to do something unexpected. What the game is also relying on is the gamer’s intuition.

As mentioned in a recent Cooper column, the term ‘intuitive’ is tossed about frequently as an attribute of a successul site. If intuition can be described as the opposite of reason, logic and observation, then what a game relies upon is a player having feelings, hunches and automatic responses to how they think something should work. Is this what we mean when we use the term in relation to site design? Or are we really saying we want the user of this site to immediately get it, and not be left wondering for a moment how to use it?

Games exploit intuition by:

• creating immersive environments that tap into three of your senses: vibrating controllers, background and reactive sounds, engaging imagery
• getting you to empathize with a character by letting you select the car of your dreams or create your long lost twin avatar
• using enough realism to stimulate an emotional response, even when you are breathing underwater on an alien planet while shooting beasts
• probing your muscle memory -not just your cognitive memory - for similar manoeuvres you’ve done on other games.

Considering the intuitiveness of a site is not just a matter of trotting out tried and true usability guidelines. There are other multimedia and interaction design levers to pull, and more ways of demonstrating that real live people will be using a site.