Five Elements of User Experience in Game Design

When searching through tons of video about UX Design in Game, I encountered Using the Five Elements of User Experience in Game Design video from Hamboning Media on Youtube.

Instead of just watching the video, I decided to take note from it which will certainly come in handy in coming future.

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Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Design

There are 5 planes or layers of elements to UX Design in the field of application or web design. With the core concept, the similar idea can be applied to Game UX Design.

1. Strategy

Strategy is like the market research phase. Research about the reason for the product, who is it for and who is the user, and why do people want it.

Questions such as why do we want to play this game may need to be solved here. Is it for immersion? Diverse gamplay? Relive history? Freedom? Achieve exploits? Or the element in 14 forms of fun?

2. Scope

Scope defines the functional requirements and content requirements of a game.

Functional Requirements

• How features work with each other
• How the features relationship is used to reach the final goal
• In gaming, the goal is the functional requirement dictating how elements interrelate and setting up a potential final outcome

Content Requirements

• Information we need to gather the value
• It is similar to the concept of game flow which provides us the sense of the game size
• It helps us to determine how big or small is the game and the time required to finish the project
• In many single player games, the content can be the main character that provide the POV, stories and other elements needed to create a narrative

3. Structure

This layer basically takes care of placement of Interface Elements which includes Interaction Design and Information Architecture.

Interaction Design focuses on how the user interacts and how the product behaves in response; while Information Architecture take care of arrangement of content elements and how they are organized to facilitate. In other words, it is all about how players interact with element like interface and how the interface system behaves in response to that.

To be more specific in terms of gameplay, this layer defines how the user got to where they are, the navigational elements, what exists in the UI, and how the elements fit together. Most of the time, the structure is similar to narrative in games.

4. Skeleton

Skeleton includes the frame of the game such as placement of images/buttons/control and wireframe of design. Navigation design and interface design will fall under this layer too.

The focus points of this layer are optimizing the arrangement for max effect and efficiency in terms of gameplay, dictating what visual elements are on the screen, how interactions are presented and arranged, ways to move around the game space, and how content is presented.

5. Surface

Surface area is the most conrete layer with images or text or somthing that is interactive. In other words, it is like the last stage of a product/game that is ready to be interacted by players. This will be the ‘final’ version of the game such as the UI or menu that the players are going to see when they play the game. This layer deals with appearance elements such as choosing the right color, typography, and layout. In general, it decides how the game looks like.

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The Order Of Five Elements

Each element is a plane lying on top of the other. The top is the most concrete and bottom is the most abstract. Each plane is also dependent on the one below it and if the planes don’t align, they will not provide a satisfying experience and games are all about experience.

A Summary Of Items In Five Elements

Moving through the planes from the most abstract (Strategy) to most concrete (Surface):

• User
• Seed or Central Concept
• Genre
• Character
• Story
• Gameplay
• Controls
• User Interface
• Look and Style