What UX designers can learn from 1990s Japanese video games

Couple of nit-pics:<p>&gt; you come across a small, glowing light — something that’ll entice any gamer in search of loot<p>That small glowing light is not a UI element to highlight the tutorial – instead, it&#x27;s what a &#x27;save point&#x27; always looks like in that game. It just so happens that the first time you interact with a save point, you get a tutorial (the same as the first time you interact with several other game mechanics, which don&#x27;t look like glowing lights.)<p>So that goes against the author&#x27;s thesis a little bit - arguably they are misinterpreting the SNES UI in the context of their modern experience.<p>&gt;Chrono Trigger is one of the few SNES RPGs I’ve played where poking around mundane rooms pays off.<p>Poking around mundane rooms in order to get rewards is almost a trope in SNES RPGs - Final Fantasy in particular was full of &quot;secrets&quot; you could find.<p>In fact, this reminds me of a criticism of game UI (Ernest Adams, maybe?) which is that its not obvious that you have to shoot crates in order to get health, or try to interact with not obviously interactive elements of the game world for hidden rewards. Experienced players quickly find these things by shooting everything and trying to interact with everything, because they are familiar with the trope from other games, but it makes the game less accessible to newcomers - arguably bad UX.

How about another one?<p>Simple design that teaches people how to use it through doing stuff rather than forced tutorials. Old school Mario games were great here, the level design basically taught you how to play the game without as much as a message box in sight.<p>Unfortunately, a lot of modern apps seem to be some overly confusing mess that try to rectify UX design issues by use of tutorials and pop ups and arrows and what not, rather than simplifying things so people can figure them out on their own.

I absolutely loathe &#x27;modern&#x27; UX design, not only because it seems to get <i>too</i> out of the way most of the time, to the point where I am struggling to find out how to <i>locate</i> the damn interface to begin using it in the first place. I am the go-to tech guy in most friend&#x2F;family circles as many of you are, and the &#x27;hidden&#x27; modern UI interfaces become a compounded problem when I am trying to help people over the phone. Back in the day, when helping my family first use Chrome, I&#x27;d say &quot;click the gear icon, in the top right&quot; - and they would find it with near 100% accuracy. Now it doesn&#x27;t matter what I say... &quot;hamburger icon&quot; (give me a break), &quot;three stacked bars&quot;, &quot;triple bars&quot; - the settings menu is no longer iconic, and modern UX has become a verbal wasteland when trying to explain anything over the phone. &quot;Hover over the little down triangle thing to the right, then the menu pops up&quot; ... &quot;swipe near the edge of your screen, not too far to the right though, just tap the very edge and the menu comes up&quot; ... these kind of explanations should not need to exist if the UX was good. At least the old games you could walk your buddy through the selections over the phone.

I know the article was talking about broad design cues, but there was one specific menu design from that era that I thought was fairly good, the ring menu system Secret of Mana.<p>This clip from Secret of Evermore (same developers, different series) shows the ring menu system:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0aYoUGmW_q0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0aYoUGmW_q0</a><p>Also, slightly off-topic but I&#x27;m not sure the article it mentions about Minesweeper being designed to teach people how to use GUIs is accurate, though it could have been an unintended consequence. IIRC Minesweeper was written by a Microsoft intern, I&#x27;ll try to find the Reddit thread where the author discussed the story behind its development.

This is crazy timing. I&#x27;m playing Chrono Trigger right now and the thing that struck me as fantastic UX this playthrough is that Crono shakes his head when you&#x27;re trying to go somewhere you can&#x27;t. I found it particularly useful when walking on the beams in the Arris Dome. It maps pretty well to the design pattern of shaking prompts when entering invalid input such as an incorrect password.

As an example of startlingly good UX in Japanese RPGs, I point to the modern persona games, which somehow manage the thankless feat of providing copious amounts of information, but always in a very useful way, as well as helping clear away the mundanities of the game (remembering enemy weakspots and such)

Contrary to what the article says I think kids&#x2F;people did read the instruction manuals back then. Some old games didn&#x27;t have certain super moves mentioned in the game at all. That probably allowed UX design to be terrible in places.

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