Why Design Docs series ‘Good Design, Bad Design’ is good for Games UI Design.
UI Design is designing the User Interface of a product — this generally involves the visual design of the product how information is presented to the user.
Designing product UI is generally associated with designing UI for websites or application design. However, one area not discussed in much detail is how we design UI for games.
Design Doc, is a Youtube channel that creates video essays on a variety of topics in game design. Their ‘Good Design, Bad Design’ series highlights the good and bad of graphic design in games, whilst alongside explaining some graphic design theory and principles to their viewers. Examples chosen are based on a combination of style and practicality.
Why I am personally fond of the series is, as an aspiring UI Designer, it not only serves as a reminder for graphic design principles and theories. It also demonstrates the design decisions taken into consideration when creating the interfaces of games. How designers can consciously choose to balance between usablity and aesthetics, and how it can either lead to success or failure of a game. Much like designing for any other product, there are some general rules and principles that can be followed, however, arguably for games these rules can be often more easily broken, as the UI in question can be more experimental depending on the experience the creators want to give to the player.
Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS / Wii U (2014)
Or more commonly referred to by the Smash Bros. community as Super Smash Bros. 4 or Smash 4 for shorthand, is a fighting game published by Nintendo for their consoles respectively.
Design Doc described how Smash 4’s Menu of the left initially looks fine, and a more colourful version of Brawl’s Menu on the right. However, there is a lack of visual hierarchy in the main menu compared to previous titles. Furthermore, he explains how the menu items are all thrown around at random like single-player and options are all under “Games & More”. From this, it leads to bad navigation and user experiences that force players to memorise where each item is.
Mario Party 8 (2007)
Mario Party 8 is a party game in which players compete on a board game with intermixed with minigames, with characters from the Mario series.
Firstly, the main thing he notes is that the main menu of the game is at aspect ratio of 16:9 however, the game itself is at a 4:3 ratio. Which in itself is a weird thing and uneccessary decision.
However the main glaring issue is the typography of the games main menu and UI. General principles for UI advice having 2–3 fonts total for readability and consistency. However, in the main menu there is 5 different font’s at place which makes the UI look really incoherent and messy.
Dead Space (2008)
One example that I’ve been interested in is diegetic UI, the UI exists within the world or setting of the game.
Dead Space is a science fiction survival horror video game, set in a spacecraft you fight against monstrous reanimated human corpses. As the UI is set within the setting of Dead Space the game doesn’t pause for you and continues on while you go through the menu, without breaking the immersion, it keeps the player focused on the tense atmosphere of the game.
These are just 3 examples given that demonstrate the good and bad of UI Design within games and how they can work either in tandem with the game or be a nuisance or at most ruin a game. This is purely from the first episode, in the series and as of writing this, there are a total of 8 videos released. While fun and engaging, if anything these serve as good case studies, and examples for the different methods and decisions that are taken within the UI.
Youtube playlist for Good Design, Bad Design here.
Design Doc Channel here.
