What UX Designers Can Learn From Video Games

Video games have to balance UX with visual design for an addictive and fun user experience.

Successful video games have certain commonalities — a simple and engaging world that focuses on getting the player completely immersed into the gameplay and easily understand how to succeed.

Such lessons are relevant to the field of user experience.

Here are a collection of helpful lessons gleaned from the gameplay systems.

“Good UX is the consequence of fulfilling the needs for autonomy, competency, stimulation, relatedness and popularity”
— Marc Hassenzahl

1. Gamification

Game design systems aid play’s engagement and interaction by providing appropriate incentives in part with the right level of challenge, rules and goals which creates a journey for a player to begin.

Common examples of establishing a similar system of rules and achievements are rewards systems for certain behavior.

For example, in Bing rewards, points are earned for web searches, mobile usage and completing daily quizzes.

Loyalty programs such as Target’s REDperks program follows a similar system.

This mobile rewards programs uses lessons from gamification to progress toward the following:

Target’s rewards program bolsters its omnichannel strategy. Because the pilot rewards program is based on in-store purchases only, customers are engaging with Target across the physical and digital realms. Leveraging Target’s physical presence also gives it a significant advantage over e-commerce pureplays that cannot provide shoppers with the in-store shopping experience they are familiar with.

The company can drive up store visits with its rewards program. Giving consumers a monetary incentive to return to a Target location will likely drive up in-store foot traffic for the mass merchant. Driving shoppers to Target locations will not only provide a lift in traffic, but also in incremental spending as shoppers browse through the store.

— Business Insider on the REDperks program

Other gameplay elements such as badging, which are simply a visualization of progress, can give players a sense of their own progression and investment, all of which add to long term engagement.

2. Easy Learning

Learning in successful games start with combining gameplay and learning rather than using a lengthy tutorial or video.

The focus should be on progressive disclosure of new things to learn. And placing a few key goals to achieve in front of the user is a good guiding principle. Placing twenty new prompts may not be the right thing on a start page as overly dense and perceived difficulty may turn the user away from even starting your product.

A common UX pitfall is overwhelming a user with clutter, whether that be wordy messages, visually heavy pages or lack of contrast and hierarchy — the concept behind easy learning is teaching the user how to be successful in the most simple and understandable way.

3. Customized for User’s Skill Level

The idea of adjusting difficulty based on user’s choice is frequent in games. Modes for beginners, intermediate and advanced players indicates that players come into the game with different context, motivations and skill levels.

From a UX perspective, this can be more subtle.

For example, allowing “skip” actions for tutorials and beginning walkthroughs can allow users who are familiar with the system to achieve their goals sooner.

The pace or frequency of help, tips and reminders can allow buffer space for beginner level users.

4. Immersive Storytelling

One interesting aspect successful video games that should make UX designers take note is how immersive and cohesive the storyline and “world” created by the final game.

From start to finish, the player is dropped into a fully fleshed out world with a unique aesthetic that touches the interface, voice and interactions the player has within the world.

For UX designers, the lesson can be this — strong visual design and branding matter. Pushing their boundaries can increase usage, brand recognition, loyalty and engagement.

Conclusion

Last but not least, the reason why so many people can spent countless hours on games but give up when an application is frustrating comes down to an element of fun.

Games aim to entertain and practically speaking, not all products can achieve this, simply because it’s uncharacteristic or inappropriate for their functionality.

“UX design is about removing problems from the user. Game design is about giving problems to the user.”

— Raph Koster, Game design vs UX design

Nevertheless, I find that by studying the success of video game mechanics, and use of learning to achieve new goals, one can find an abundance of inspiration to draw from for great UX.

—

Thanks for reading! Feel free to check out my design work or my new handbook on UX design, now available on Amazon.