Signal to Noise, an industrial design oriented blog, points out this article claiming that complexity causes 50% of product returns.
The average consumer in the United States will struggle for 20 minutes to get a device working, before giving up, the study found… Product developers, brought in to witness the struggles of average consumers, were astounded by the havoc they created.
How many games and demos have you given up on because you couldn’t figure out how to do something simple in the first 20 minutes? There are countless stories of bad first impressions in MMOs – it’s something we do extremely poorly.
In Ultima Online, I watched as an entire focus group couldn’t figure out how to chop down a tree (you had to click on the axe, then the tree). In Shadowbane, players had a hard time finding their first batch of monsters to kill. In DDO, I recently watched someone spend 10 minutes trying to figure out how to use a healing kit before quitting in disgust. In City of Heroes, I watched numerous new players stumble with the instanced city concept, while trying to get together and group with their friends.
This isn’t the MMO experience being screwed because other people are inherently bastards. Other people being bastards has the potential to at least be funny. But it’s hard to find it funny when the game simply doesn’t operate like you know, intuitively, that it should.
Of course, the new trend is more tutorials and helper text. I recently watched someone go through a tutorial where 4 seperate windows with text were on screen at one time, each helpfully trying to give a nugget of information. Note: video games are not a text-based medium. Find a way to teach without making your players read – at least not more than one thing at a time.
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