Anyhow, I know Jason doesn’t like Word 2007’s interface, but I was curious if anyone else had used it recently–in part because my job involves me teaching how to use Word 2007 to new users and I’ve been using in for almost a year now. And like all schemas for interaction, I’ve gotten used to it and can now use it as well as I ever was able to use 2003.

Just thoughts.

C

These are certainly worthwhile goals with visible if hard to measure qualities, but I don’t think they should always be ideals for design. For players that dedicate themselves to a game, a complex and opaque interface to a practically unlearnable set of mechanics can be a lot of fun. Second language learning can be such a game, and I see no reason why software games need to be any different.

Some of the best games have simple rules/mechanics that produce interesting emergent behavior. But the fun of rule-learning is often best done in a game that is hard to understand.

One consistent need in both situation though is for consistency. Being able to make generalizations (whether you’re playing to discover them, or playing to utilize them) is key to successful gaming.

I feel like any game with this many controls needs to have at least an optional tutorial to walk you through everything. There’s something very pleasing, though, about particularly straightforward game interfaces, like Portal’s.

The classic example of this is Word, a very powerful tool, that is a nightmare from a user interface experience. Contrast this with something like OmniOutliner, which is, at its heart, a single purpose application (it does outlines, though there is greater functionality hidden in there for advanced users who want to dig), but has a wonderful design interface that’s fairly intuitive.

My personal feeling is that any software package that requires an instruction manual, especially for core tasks, is flawed. And that a “perfect” application will do what the user expects in the way that the user expects it to do so. Of course, this perfection is possibly unattainable, but it is something to be strived for.

I’d say a similar approach could be taken with games. I know personally, as a casual gamer, I played Halo once at a friend’s house for about 10 minutes before deciding that the interface was way to cumbersome for me to want to play it any longer. While Halo is the worst example I’ve run into, I’ve run into this with other games as well. It is hard to get into the narrative of a game when you’re spending all of your time fighting with the controls.

There has to be some kind of middle ground that allows users to play the game in a fairly intuitive manner that doesn’t limit the narrative experience.