Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Great idea! The New York Times had an article on the weekend about analogies being a good way for human minds to imagine and resolve issues and there are a lot of analogies that could be drawn between games and internet sites. People sell ad placements in video games, they got that idea from websites. It sounds so simple in hindsight, but in the past video games of car rallies would have fake billboards. Now they are real.

I’m really interested in how this article bypasses the major differences in games and websites. On a website you want to get the user as fast as possible to the desired piece of information. The user loses his motivation pretty fast if he has to discover things on his own. Games are kind of the opposite. If you give to much away at the beginning or if the game is “to easy” you loose the player pretty fast.

This idea sounds fun. I’d really appreciate some tips on how to make websites more fun. And it could be very interesting to discuss the usual “you have to make your site immersive” and “you got to live your brand” or “people like to discover stuff on your site” what you often hear from designers and so-called (self-called) Brand Managers and graphical artists.

Sounds like a great idea.

Similar to Joannes’ comment, I’d be really interested to hear what games can teach us about flow. Mostly they’re designed precisely to keep people out of flow (swinging blades, dead ends, annoying monsters), whereas a site should keep the user in flow – perhaps by learning about how to impede flow, we can learn how to remove those barriers in our own designs?

Great topic, Mia! I can’t wait to read it. Cennydd, I rather disagree that games are designed to “keep people out of flow” and that what UX & IxD could learn is “how to impede flow”. Now, this isn’t to say that games have no obstacles or challenges as an assumed part of the flow, they do. As Johannes noted, games without obstaces or challenges are too easy, resulting in the player loosing interest. If the “flow” is defined as the primary path toward an accompishment, task, or peice of information, which it is in site design, then I think that games are carefully orchestrated to keep people in the flow. Games that deadend players with unsolvable puzzles or impossible tasks are considered poorly designed games. Game designers have to balance player actions against story and pre-determined actions needed to advance the game or story. Too much of the former and the game lacks vision and story; too much of the latter and the player is along for the ride rather than a participant. Even “open world” games, which intentionally have fewer pre-constructed tasks or levels, have to carefully balance keeping the player in the flow vs. wandering aimlessly or traversing terrain they’ve already experienced.