User Interface Patterns for Games
Author of this post: Michael Stiso | About Blog Authors »
I can’t remember when I first heard of design patterns. It was several years ago, I’m sure, but my awareness of them was a somewhat gradual buildup, not unlike the sudden dawning that the boss is calling my name while I’ve been daydreaming during a meeting. Whenever it was, I came a bit late to the party, because UI design patterns made their debut into interaction design society about 10 years ago….
And since then, they’ve spawned large collections both public and corporate, books, newsgroups, anti-patterns, and even a variety of names—interaction design patterns, user experience patterns, usability patterns, user interface patterns, web design patterns, and probably more. I’ll be calling the lot of them UI patterns, for simplicity.
Despite their popularity, UI patterns have received relatively little attention toward how they are or should be used. How often do designers and others actually use patterns, and why do they do so? What kinds of designers use them most, and how big a role do patterns play in their work? Perhaps more importantly, are patterns structured in a way that optimizes their both their usability and reusability? For example, the concept originated in architecture as a means of capturing and reusing the best practices that had developed within the field, and it serves the same purpose in interaction design. However, compared to other methods of knowledge compilation, patterns have a particular challenge: They must be structured generally enough to apply to most instances of a certain class of design issue, but concretely enough to provide specific guidance for handling any one of those instances.
To answer some of those questions, I sent a questionnaire around to several newsgroups likely to be inhabited by various types of designers. I’m still sifting through the results, but I can share some initial findings on who tends to use patterns and why.
First, of the people responding, a little over half had at least tried to use UI design patterns in the past couple of years. They did so most commonly for designing web and web app UIs, and occasionally but much less frequently for desktop software; mobile UIs were a rare target of pattern usage. The most common and, by far, primary reason they used patterns was for design inspiration, followed distantly by the need to address a use case. Communicating with development and design teams was also a common use, but not a primary one.
People seem to be generally positive toward patterns, considering them both useful and efficient. The survey participants said that they find it easy to locate libraries and browse them for patterns, although searching libraries is a bit more difficult. And when they have an appropriate pattern in hand, they seem to have little trouble in applying it to a specific design problem. The challenge is in locating an appropriate pattern: Although people can easily find what they need in libraries to help with a general design issue, they consider it relatively difficult to locate patterns that they can successfully apply to a specific problem.
That finding likely explains the use of patterns as being primarily inspirational. However, it also suggests that patterns may not be achieving an ideal balance between generic and specific: Though they are broad enough to address general types of issues, they are perhaps too broad to help with specific instances of those issues. On the other hand, the otherwise positive opinion of UI design patterns suggests that designers are ok with all that. Unfortunately, I neglected to ask in the survey whether designers actually want patterns that can address specific problems, so I can’t say for sure which is the case.
Modified World of Warcraft Interface
On the gaming front, just under a fifth of people who took the survey said that their main application interest is in games. Of those people, the ones who had used patterns in the past two years were likely to have gotten them from a friend, and they were less likely to be using them to comply with corporate standards. Those two findings suggest perhaps a more informal use of patterns in game development than in other environments. However, because of the relatively small numbers of people responding to the survey items in question, the statistics here are pretty fuzzy.
The results didn’t highlight any other pattern-related preferences that game developers have. On the other hand, they did show that people with a background in graphic design or aesthetics were likely to use patterns for reasons beyond just inspiration –– for example, for communications or to address a use case. Those with interaction and UI design experience showed the same tendency, but to a lesser extent. Interestingly, a background in mobile UI design, which was associated with an interest in gaming apps, also led to a wider range of uses for design patterns. Finally, greater coding experience led to more-negative views of pattern usability, the basic grievances being with the searchability of pattern libraries, and the findability of patterns that can help with the specifics of a problem.
Summing up, the survey paints a picture of a popular tool that is good for generating design ideas, particularly with regard to web-based UIs. The tool may be a bit too general to help with specific design problems, but that issue is perhaps a concern mainly for designers who deal with code.
I’m hoping that those findings and others can point the way toward better methods of structuring and organizing patterns. Library search functionality, for example, seems a good first candidate for improvement.
