The joke goes something like this: if interaction designers had made Super Mario Brothers, the game would just have one large button labeled “Rescue Princess.” There is some truth to that. Interaction designers strive for products that let people get tasks done quickly and easily. Yet, the fun of gameplay is overcoming challenges and rules deliberately set to impede a player’s progress. So as interaction designers, how do we separate challenges that add to the gameplay from those points of frustration which detract? For game developers without access to interaction designers or researchers, the challenge can be even greater. When developing a new game, what general principles should be followed to make sure it remains safely on the fun side of frustrating? Jakob Nielsen gave us the ten canonized Usability Heuristics for web and system design; our humble goal is to do the same for computer games. This presentation will provide ten interface heuristics applicable to games as well a few useful “discount” evaluation techniques for when you don’t have the time, or the money, for a full lab study.
Corey Chandler is a Principal Interaction Designer at Deep Dive Design, a design consultancy in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he has worked for the past 2 years. His past clients have included Netflix, flickr, Shopping.com, as well as numerous startups in Silicon Valley.
Before Deep Dive, Corey was a Lead Interaction Designer at eBay, where he worked for 5 years. In addition to co-authoring several design patents in the area of search experience design, he is also an active participant in the design community, including teaching courses at Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conferences and hosting a panel at South by Southwest Interactive 2008.
John Mark Josling has been designing experiences for over 10 years. After starting life as a software developer, John Mark returned to school to earn a Masters of Information from the Berkeley School of Information. Since then, he has done interaction design work for Google, eBay and Yola. SXSW11 will be John Mark's second time speaking at SXSW, once more talking about his two favorite topics: IxD and games.
