The good, the bad and the unpleasant - A study of graphical user interfaces in video games
Turunen, Jyrki Johannes (2017)
2017
Tietotekniikan koulutusohjelma
Tieto- ja sähkötekniikan tiedekunta - Faculty of Computing and Electrical Engineering
This publication is copyrighted. You may download, display and print it for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2017-02-08
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201701201066
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201701201066
Tiivistelmä
This thesis revolves around user interface design, more specifically graphical user interface design in a particular context, which in this case is video games. It describes what makes this design focus so unique and important, how it differs from “traditional” software interface design and how do you actually make a great user interface for a video game. The thesis aims to analyze existing solutions, examples and guidelines for GUI design and then provide a concrete set of instructions and tips on how any designer can improve, hopefully even drastically, their own game's user interface or at least ensure a basic, acceptable baseline for it.
The structure of the thesis starts with a short introduction to the topic and a description of the methodology used in the thesis. It then proceeds to talk about user interface design in general, introducing also the terms of usability and user experience (UX), graphical user interface (GUI) and game design while also providing more than one angle into the design process. In the third chapter the focus shifts onto games themselves, giving an overview of their history, what makes games unique as an entertainment method and also talking about the concepts of persuasive technology and gamification. Finally, chapters 4 and 5 focus on the video game GUIs themselves, analyzing existing examples and methods, all the while building up my own set of instructions and points to take note of when designing these interfaces. At the end, a summary section wraps up the thesis.
The methodology of the thesis relies heavily on doing research on existing solutions and using credible sources to deduce why any particular found issue was good or bad for that particular game and how it could work in other contexts. Data gathering about video games, usability and user interface design proved critical to be able to understand how to rate the value of any given solution and also enabled the creation of a list of design questions as part of the empirical part of the thesis that is then used to further scrutinize a few specific game user interfaces.
After completing the empirical part some of the findings proved quite surprising while others were solidified as the basic blocks of good UI design principles. While previously game designers relied heavily on displaying great amounts of (arbitrary) information to the player, regardless of the game genre, nowadays a trend towards minimalism can be found. Nonetheless, scrapping important information still leads to problems, so one of the mains issues for designers is to define what is important and what is not and this is sometimes a surprisingly difficult task. For this reason as well a list of questions was assembled that can help designers overcome this difficulty.
The structure of the thesis starts with a short introduction to the topic and a description of the methodology used in the thesis. It then proceeds to talk about user interface design in general, introducing also the terms of usability and user experience (UX), graphical user interface (GUI) and game design while also providing more than one angle into the design process. In the third chapter the focus shifts onto games themselves, giving an overview of their history, what makes games unique as an entertainment method and also talking about the concepts of persuasive technology and gamification. Finally, chapters 4 and 5 focus on the video game GUIs themselves, analyzing existing examples and methods, all the while building up my own set of instructions and points to take note of when designing these interfaces. At the end, a summary section wraps up the thesis.
The methodology of the thesis relies heavily on doing research on existing solutions and using credible sources to deduce why any particular found issue was good or bad for that particular game and how it could work in other contexts. Data gathering about video games, usability and user interface design proved critical to be able to understand how to rate the value of any given solution and also enabled the creation of a list of design questions as part of the empirical part of the thesis that is then used to further scrutinize a few specific game user interfaces.
After completing the empirical part some of the findings proved quite surprising while others were solidified as the basic blocks of good UI design principles. While previously game designers relied heavily on displaying great amounts of (arbitrary) information to the player, regardless of the game genre, nowadays a trend towards minimalism can be found. Nonetheless, scrapping important information still leads to problems, so one of the mains issues for designers is to define what is important and what is not and this is sometimes a surprisingly difficult task. For this reason as well a list of questions was assembled that can help designers overcome this difficulty.