Two clicks or video
January 12th, 2007 by dinahOur very first poll, for all you GameTappers out there.
In the current GameTap client, opening a game infocard is always consistent, whether the game is local on your computer or not. That means, if you select “Play” (picture 1, below), the Start Game cylinder opens, video begins playing, we make the game ready to play (for you techies, we mount the volume), and light up the Start Play button (picture 2, below). To begin playing, you select “Start Play” in the Start Play cylinder.
Things to think about:
- How often do you open a game infocard when you don’t intend to play the game?
- What about games with challenge lobbies?
Please give us your opinions AND comments, please!
Should we jump right to the Start Play cylinder when a game is local?
January 12th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
I voted no on this initially, just because many times I pull up a game just to browse through the bonus features (which are pretty well written, even if one or two are a little off with info - Rolling Thunder 2/3, I’m looking at you).
However, that’s only a qualified no. There’s one thing I thought about that would change my answer to yes on this question, and that’s if you could auto add games into Favorites without having to load the infocard. It’d be a very useful thing for new users and for big release weeks.
January 12th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Yoinks - incomplete thought there. I meant to say many times I pull up an infocard to bookmark it to Favorites and/or to read the bonus features.
And I think I connect infocard loading with Favorites just because that’s what I’m doing usually the first thing I load up the card. Which makes me wonder if maybe a Favorites quick save couldn’t load cards in the background instead of in the foreground like they do now. Hmmmm…
Thinking about all this is making my head trip up. I think I need a vacation.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Interesting thoughts there, batzradio. I know what you’re talking about — I do the same thing. The deal where you’re all “ooh, I need to come back to this… ah, and this one I need to check out later… can’t forget this one either” in the mode of trying to mark/categorize things for the future. We’ve been thinking a bit about that particular use case as well.
Keep in mind the above go-straight-to-the-play/video-cylinder behavior would only happen for games you’ve previously downloaded (and presumably mined for Bonus Material). And even with those, the infocard content is all still available with a single click. One click to start the game; one click to the Overview/Instructions/Bonus Material.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
I got to say, skipping the “are you sure” style stages of starting/ending a game is always good news to me
January 12th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
I got to say, that’s a tought one. I had to think long and hard about that. There are so many variables to consider. Normally there are I’m all in favor in eliminiating a click, but I have to say that with the numorous factors to consider on GT infocards consistancy is probably the way to go. This would prevent an increase on the learning curve on the Gametap UI.
January 13th, 2007 at 9:39 am
I voted No because quite often I come back to an old game and need to review the information about it again or want to check out the bonus features now that I’m more familiar with the game.
I would like it if the game would just start when I click, “Play” Rather than bringing that other “noisy” video and “Start Play” window. When I press “Play” I just want to start playing the game. I do not want to be distracted by “GameTap” theme muzac. When I quit playing, then bringing up that window would be fine.
January 13th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
i voted yes because RoyWagner voted no.
okay, i kid. i voted yes because, as IPON so concisely put, saving the step is always a good thing, and the minimum number of steps to satisfaction is part of good usability design.
to answer your questions: i only open the infocard NOT to play a game when a) i don’t know the controls or b) i’m verifying/denying someone else’s bug on an infocard.
on games with challenge lobbies, the challenge lobby button is always there, and always aborts the start play sequences, so there’s no harm, no foul, so to speak.
January 13th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
I’m in the ‘No’ camp on this one. It’s a nice idea, but I could see it introducing some problems as well. A couple that come to mind that haven’t really been mentioned yet:
The biggest issue I see coming from a usability standpoint would be the fact that there’s no visual cue in the game ring to indicate whether a title had been previously downloaded or not. This means that the interface would be both inconsistent and unpredictable, from a user’s standpoint, without reworking other parts of the interface as well.
Another issue I could see with this design is if a user changed their mind after clicking on a game. Clicking ‘Quit/Cancel Play’ would then drop them to the game’s infocard rather than back to the place they came from. This breaks another level of consistency in the GameTap UI. For example, clicking a game from GameTap TV brings up the game’s infocard and closing the Info Card drops you back to the GameTap TV screen you came from. Jumping directly to the Start Play cylinder means that you have to make a decision to be inconsistent in how the game ring behaves *or* to be inconsistent in how the Start Play cylinder behaves.
Personally, I’m a big fan of consistency and rather like the way the design is set up now.
January 14th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
I’ve got to go with the consistency crowd.. makes things a lot less confusing when you don’t have to remember “This does this UNLESS you have it downloaded and then it does this”
January 16th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
I like reducing clicks almost as much as I like consistency. So I’d vote to keep the Infocard appearance consistent for all games. Perhaps, on the square button that brings up the Infocard, you could add a small ‘Play’ triangle to the bottom corner as a shortcut to bypass the Infocard.
Another way to make accessing my games quicker: Remember/display the games in my ‘recently opened games’ list even if I close/restart GameTap. Why is the list cleared when GameTap is exited? That would save me a click through the game vault.
January 16th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Good idea, Deg. I presume you mean the game dock at the bottom of the screen? (Since now we persist the recent list in the “Recent” category in My Favorites, but that requires a trip to the vault)
As for adding a play button to the GamePlate in the vault… well, there are a lot of ways to open an infocard, and some of the thumbnails are pretty small… Something for us to think about, at any rate.
January 18th, 2007 at 12:21 am
Dinah, and xamount,
I purpose a question that might affect votes as Slack3r78 pointed out aside for the DL ring there is no visual cue for a game being already downloaded, but how does the DL subring behave when a sub account has downloaded a game that the other account didn’t download. And how would this new feature work?
IIRC, around build 1.6 you guys allowed sub accounts to “tack on” to games that another account begun to Download but stopped. But I don’t recall what happened when a sub account tried to DL a game that another sub account already had (presume same machine BTW for all sub accounts, and DL=download). I don’t use subaccounts so I never paid attenention to this behavior. I imagine that GT would see the game as downloaded on start up anyway, but the end user may not know this, thus the interface becomes truely unpredictable (”Why is it jumping straight to play? I never downloaded this game?” when someone doesn’t know brother jonnie did.) Arguably the end user would gather this eventually (probably pretty quickly) but you assume the end user isn’t a 12 year old (which isn’t a valid assumption).
Oddly enough, (and this isn’t a UI question I suppose) how does GT handle all of this with storage limits? Could I lock my siblings out of DLing games by simply hitting my max the fastest?
Alot of questions spawned by one interesting suggestion.
January 18th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Great questions. If another user (sub-account or not) logged on to your computer, he’d see everything that was local in the Downloaded subcategory of Favorites. In the infocard, the “Get the Game” button would be disabled, and the Play button lit up. So, you’re right. For the , behavior would be truly unpredictable without a visual cue on the GamePlate. And visual cues on the GamePlate are complicated by the fact that we use thumbnails from a lot of different places (GameTap TV and My GameTap) to link you directly to a game. IOW, the cues would have to be pretty big to be recognizable in thumbnail form.
As far as storage management is concerned, you’d not lock your siblings out because GameTap would get busy and delete things (oldest, least used, etc) to make room for what you request. (We’ll probably be talking more about storage management with all of you in the months to come.)
This poll has been very interesting for us — thoughtful responses, good conversation, and a result that (frankly) surprised us. (And we love being surprised - as long as it’s *before* we release a feature.
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