What We Can Learn from Games

Game designers have decades of experience in making things that are fun. If we keep in mind how games are different from our own products, user interface designers can learn a lot from how games are designed.

Progress

In his paper “Heuristics for Designing Enjoyable User Interfaces: Lessons from Computer Games,”[139] Thomas W. Malone notes:

For both toys and tools, however, users need some kind of performance feedback to know how well they are achieving their goals. In games, this performance feedback is provided by things like the missing bricks in Breakout and the position of the incorrect arrows on the number line in Darts. There may be similar ways to incorporate performance feedback for the external task into ...

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