5 things I learned about user experience from Shigeru Miyamoto
Remember that friend who bursts into the room in a storm and says with bright eyes, “Who’s coming with me for a trip to Costa Rica?” Only the excitement in his eyes make you fly with him to the other side of the world, knowing that strange things will undoubtedly happen. Look again at the man’s mischievous eye in the picture here. Don’t you feel like going with him on an adventure?
Indeed, that’s exactly what this man did to so many of us. His name is Shigeru Miyamoto, he designed the most successful games in the world to date, including the legendary Mario and Donkey Kong, and carried millions of people into his adventures. His games have been at the top of the bestseller list for decades; some still call him the “father of modern games” and “Walt Disney of video games”. Shigeru works at Nintendo, who opened the door for him as an amateur illustrator and industrial design student, and quickly became a master of User Experience. To this day, game designers are learning about the conventions Shigeru launched, while still using and developing them.
And in order to be good user experience designers, it is always worthwhile learning from games. So why not just go and learn from the source?
Games are made with love or not at all.
To understand a bit of Shigeru’s way of thinkin, it is impossible not to know a little bit about him. He was born into a world without technology. There were forests and great plains around his parents’ house, and he spent most of his childhood hiking and playing pranks. On one of his trips, he discovered burrows in the ground, which would later inspire him to design the successful game “The Legend of Zelda.”
We’ll skip to a few decades later, when Shigeru decided to lose weight. We’ve all been there, am I right? He decided that it was possible to enjoy the process, and created a home game for his family. The weekly weight level of each family member was marked on the wall, which filled with colorful waving dots. When he saw how excited his family was, he went to work and created a new weight loss game:
This is not the only time his house became a game. In an interview, Shigeru said that every few months he completely changes the house’s furniture arrangement, to create a surprise. Can you see the connection between curiosity and pleasure, and creating games? We’ll get to it soon.
Using user experience principles
Today, Shigeru is 64 years old. When he designed his first games, the user experience field was still at its early stages. For example, Don Norman had just published his book, “The Design of Everyday Things” in 1988. Shigeru had released the game “Mario” seven years before. The entire game, and the ones he created later, are full of user experience principles that have become fundamental over the years. He had great psychological intuitions that we learn from to this day, we will review some of them here.
1. User-centered design
Today, the words “user-centered design” have become a “Buzzword.” We enjoy their new status, when we enter a meeting with a customer and succeed in persuading him to do user research before designing the product.
But 40 years ago, the gaming world was almost entirely dominated by developers. They always thought about how to “beat” the games that preceded them by making games more complex and developed than before. Shigeru, on the other hand, mainly tried to create pleasure for the future players. For example, at the beginning of the design process, he focused on the game controllers. He sat down like a player, held the controllers like a player, punctuated the sense of holding it, felt every gesture. Is it simple? Is it fun? Only once he was satisfied, he went to design the game itself. No one worked this way at the time.
Many of the following principles seem to stem from his desire to understand the user and take him through a simple and enjoyable experience.
2. Creating enjoyment
All the games can, perhaps, be summed up as “fun”. But how does this happen exactly? How can you create this elusive feeling?
Shigeru has many things to say on this topic. If we summarize them into one sentence, it will be - go out and look at places where people experience enjoyment and get inspired. Here are some examples he described in interviews:
satisfaction feeling
People like to finish things. At that moment of termination, they experience a small moment of happiness. So, in the game there will be lots of small stages, at the end of which everyone gets a score or a gift. This sequence of satisfactions causes the desire to go back and play again and again.
A clear goal
People are more relaxed when there is a clear goal or target, and therefore feel better knowing there is an end-point. If we create a simple linear process, they will know exactly what problem they need to solve, and when exposed, they will feel satisfaction (Soundfamiliar?).
“A game that keeps a smile on the player’s face is a wonderful thing. To do this, we must return to the beginning, to recapture the essence that made people who enjoy games even now enjoy them in the first place”.
Shigeru Miyamoto, interview with Entertainment Weekly, 2007
Also easy is fun
People like challenges, but also moments of satisfaction between these challenges. If we were challenged all the time, we would collapse. Sometimes when the player is disqualified, the game takes him back a few levels. For a moment it sucks, but suddenly the player rediscovers the joys of the easy things.
The element of surprise
People love jokes and riddles. These give them enough information to get ahead and understand what’s happening, but in the end, there is the pleasure of uncovering the joke, and the surprised exclamation of, ”how did I not get it?”
That’s exactly how you build a game.
In “Mario”, Shigeru introduced many secret stages, so that experienced users would continue to enjoy looking for new surprises. It can be said that he invented the idea of adding Delight to games and interfaces.
3. Learning from other or parallel worlds
As we have seen, this is perhaps one of the things that most characterize Shigeru Miyamoto — the observation of completely different worlds and their projection into the game. This ability has created completely new conventions that the gaming world has not seen before. We saw earlier the inspiration from the tunnels in the ground. Here are a few more examples:
Camera angle
In many games we know, the player goes on a surface in one direction and the screen moves with it. This concept was invented by Shigeru. How did he get there? Comics of course. Prior to his career at Nintendo, he had illustrated comic books and had drawn inspiration from Japanese anime. When he began designing games, he asked himself-why not tell a story from the “camera angle” like I did before in my illustrations? That’s how the comic came to life as a game.
Telling a story
Comics is not just a camera angle but rather a story. When Shigeru began designing games he wanted to create empathetic characters and stories. How to create this empathy? By building a character, adding a plot to it and BOOM - here is a narrative that the player can connect to. The first game in the world that had a full story, was also the first game designed by Shigeru Miyamoto - Donkey Kong. The game is about a simple carpenter who is going to save a damsel in distress from a cruel gorilla, on a construction site. Classic. The game exploded in stores and broke the sales records of those years in America.
Objects and elements
When was the last time you watched a movie or series and said, “I am going to use this”? Shigeru watched “Alice in Wonderland” like a good boy, and heard the Caterpillar tell Alice how eating the mushroom makes you taller.
Sounds familiar? That’s right, Super Mario.
What’s the deal with the pipes in Super Mario anyway? And the plants? And the coins? All these lead us to the next principle.
4. Learning curve
Shigeru’s goal was that everyone, no matter their level of experience, could start playing easily without reading a single line of instructions. To achieve this feat, he invested in the initial stages of learning so that will be very simple and intuitive. Today we call this process “Onboarding”, and some have even written books about it. Now, let’s go into the process that Shigeru planned for the Mario game, which is studied in depth by designers to this day:
Step one: To where
When you first enter the game, Mario stands on the left and waits. Purposely from the left rather than the middle, the vast space on the right actually gives the player the message — here we have to go. What is happening here is called “Affordance”, which is the message that an object conveys to the user about how to use it.
Step Two: What to do?
An angry creature appears opposite him. His gaze explains everything — Mario needs to escape or attack. But how? The played doesn’t know much yet, hits the creature and dies. But after dying, the game restarts from the exact same starting-point. It’s a short cycle, but eventually the playrer understand that you just have to jump over it. And it happens to everyone very quickly. This stage is very, very simple. The game doesn’t burden the player with bigger challenges yet. When he passes it, he will advance to a more complex challenge.
Step Three: What Next?
Affordance is the name of the game here (well, Mario, really). If there are question marks, it’s probably necessary to examine what is inside them. Is there a text to explain that? No need. Later there are pipes, and the player understands that he can enter them. The coins also convey the message that they can be picked up and the plants that can be climbed. Today these things are clear to us as players, but Shigeru was the first to implement them.
Step four: A necessary discovery
After raising a question mark, a mushroom comes out of it and walks toward the player. Is it good? Bad? We have no idea, so we’ll intuitively try to jump over it — like we already learned with the creature. But Shigeru has planned it so that we cannot jump over it, and against our will we run into it, learning that it makes Mario grow. Mario is big and we’re happy. This is another alternative to a series of explanations in the instructions.
Step five: What is difficult in training will become easy in a battle
Later in the game there will be holes that will disqualify the player if Mario falls into them. But just before the first hole, there is a fictitious hole. The user can practice the jump over it without risking falling and disqualification:
All these stages (and many others that I did not specificy, play for yourselves) were created so that the player will always feel at home and never feel like he’s losing his sense of control, even for a moment. Shigeru says that this control allows the user a sense to feel like a super hero, “I can do anything.” And in the end, as Samuel Hulick said, “People do not buy your product, but the better version of themselves” and added an explanation based on Mario:
5. Holistic user experience
Shigeru was also a involved in composing the music for the games he designed. He felt that he could not design anything without being involved in the overall experience. It’s a broad view of the product and an understanding that design is not just what you see, but everything the user goes through during and after use.
And vis a vis Mario’s music, here’s a bonus starring Shigeru:
Summary: Questions to ask in the product design process
Okay, so Shigeru created original and fun things, but what can we take away from here?
User-oriented design: Do we really know who will use our product? What state is our product in? How simple is it for the user? Is it possible to simplify it further?
Creating pleasure: Will the user feel progress over the course of the game? Will he have a clear goal? Are there surprises waiting for him on the way?
Learning from parallel worlds: Have we sought to live only in worlds similar to our product? What other worlds are dealing with similar problems? When did we, as designers, last leave the screen and look at the world around us?
Learning curve: When you first enter our product, do you easily understand what to do? How do we hide as many interruptions as possible, so that the user will hardly feel that he is learning anything? And how will we help him throughout the process?
Holistic user experience: Does the user go through experiences we have not touched? Have we noticed, for example, sound and load speed?
