Games UX: Building the right onboarding experience
We say “You only get one chance to make a good first impression”. In video games, that chance is the Onboarding, also called “First Hour”, “First Time User Experience” or “Learning Experience”. The way you think about that onboarding and design it can impact many aspects of your game:
- Player Acquisition
- Player Engagement
- Player Satisfaction
- Player Monetization
- Ratings
- Refunds
- Studio Reputation
The best onboardings feel frictionless and empowering while the worst ones will leave you full of rage & frustration.
How can one make an optimal onboarding? Let’s review a few tips.
It’s Not 0 Onboarding OR Full Popup Onboarding
Having no onboarding means you are gatekeeping people based on their culture of video games, of your game genre, their abilities or their motivation. It will have a direct impact on the size of your player base and the reception of your game.
Heavy, long and boring onboarding are pretty bad too. Nielsen Norman Group made a whole article on the limits of that trend. Basically, it can be so boring, frustrating and not even clear that it ends up harming the game.
NNG’s article is about mobile app but I’ve witnessed the same in playtests results of games following such patterns.
Making a good onboarding is about finding smoother solutions than those two.
First Hours Should Give a Good Grasp of the Game
Genshin Impact is a pretty good benchmark here. In the first hours you are introduced to:
- Core Combat Gameplay
- Core Puzzle Experience
- Progression & Monetization Loop
- Short, Medium & Long Term Plots
- Key Characters
You directly get to discover what the game is really about and the main play motivations.
This is easier to achieve when there’s a clearly communicated vision that’s well aligned with the marketing, first hours and core experience. Any misalignment could lead to a negative player experience.
Know Your Players Profiles
Genshin Impact’s engagement keys seem to come from the characters, story, progression, collection, free roaming and exploration. Thus the focus on those topics right from the very beginning of the game.
Take the time to learn more about players profiles and the motivations you are targeting in your game.
Provide a Positive Context For Learning
In Zelda: Breath of the Wild, new mechanics are introduced in the shrines. While the game is an open world, shrines are safe controlled environment made to help players experiment & learn a new mechanic.
Shrines are puzzles to solve to unlock a new ability permanently. They feature:
- A variety of challenges to overcome
- Each challenge specifically designed to help players deepen their understanding
- No time limit
- No long term punition for making a mistake
- Short respawn time
- An experimentation field to learn by doing
Shrines are not a succession of popups to read without playing. They are puzzles players will seek and enjoy solving throughout their experience of the game.
Players do not avoid shrines, they seek them to get new puzzles and abilities.
Fix Problems At Their Root Causes
When you hear that, it should raise a red flag:
“We will fix it in the UI”
“We will fix it with a tutorial”
When a system is too complex, fuzzy or doesn’t really answer players motivations, no UI or tutorial may be able to fix it.
That also means that you can’t design the game and THEN design the learning experience. Each time you design a game element, you should ask yourself:
- How are players going to discover that element?
- How are players going to experiment and learn more about that element?
- Why would players want to interact with that element?
- Which players motivations, needs or problems does it answer?
- What would be the ideal context and way to learn about that element?
Good Onboardings Comes From Teamwork
The best learning experiences emerge when the various design specialties are working hand in hand. Mapping the first hours’ key aspects together can be a good practice to ease the collaboration:
- Gameplay
- Learning
- Progression
- Storytelling
- World
Discuss when and how each element should appear and work together in harmony to provide the best experience. Think of it as a continuous learning experience throughout the game.
When each teams work in silo one after the other without collaboration & iteration, none of them can really perform. In the end, you get clunky systems poorly exposed and full of bugs. All of the people who were involved in the making are now frustrated.
A game like Hades clearly shows how learning, progression & narration can work in harmony to provide a great experience.
Map The Required Learnings
Typical required learnings include:
- Narrative Context
- Goals & Motivations
- Controls
- Core Gameplay, Core Loop, Progression Loop
- Keys to Perform
The key is to break all the learnings down and provide the ideal context for learning & experimentation throughout the game by working closely with each design field.
If you gather all the important things to learn in one moment, it can end up being overwhelming and boring. Besides, learning is a key part of the enjoyment when it’s well done.
Consider Non Obtrusive Tips
They key is to convey tips & information without negatively impacting their experience.
Northgard uses contextual tips to give important information at a specific moment of the game without blocking players in their progression.
For example, when a player discovers an area protected by enemies while exploring, a contextual tips appears. It teaches players to build a Traning Camp to recruit warriors to take control of the area by military force.
Being able to ignore or skip a tutorial gives the players control over their pacing and can ensure a more enjoyable experience. If players skip without reading, more friction will only make the experience more frustrating. The ideal option is to change the way we currently teach players about the mechanics to make it more entertaining & fluid.
Half Life is quite famous for it’s invisible tutorial. That doesn’t mean nothing is done to make players learn new aspects of the game. It’s invisible, not absent.
Adapt To The Situation
Each solution has pros & cons. Let’s take the example of the non-obtrusive tips:
- Strengths: Non intrusive, doesn’t affect the game flow.
- Weaknesses: Doesn’t belong in the game’s fantasy, often missed in stressful situations.
An ideal use of a non-obtrusive tip is to convey a secondary information in a low stress & stimulation moment in a game that doesn’t prioritize immersion over everything else.
While it’s great in Northgard, it may not be adapted to an immersive simulator like Deus Ex or a fast paced game like Doom Eternal.
Great Learning Experience Requires Great Usability
In Halo, Hunters are designed in a way that conveys the enemy’s weaknesses and strengths:
- Strengths: Big armor, big shield, huge canon.
- Weaknesses: weak points not covered by the armor and with different colors.
You cannot dissociate the design of the mechanics and their exposition. You cannot leave one to a design specialty, the other to another one and stop the collaboration here.
Accessibility is a widely discussed topic and designers should both ask themselves:
- How can I best convey the various aspects players should discover and understand?
- How can those aspect be conveyed in a variety of ways for the diversity of players to grasp?
Information communicated visually only won’t be sufficient for players with low vision for example. On the other hand, those players may be more efficient than average at spotting & understanding audio cues. Play to their strengths, not to their weaknesses.
It’s often hard and ineffective to try to compensate for a bad usability with an onboarding. Usability is the glass ceiling of the learning experience.
Different Game = Different Onboarding
There are different approaches:
- Fortnite: Save The World provides a controlled story path to discover the mechanics.
- Zelda: Breath of the Wild provides specific controlled areas for learning.
- Titanfall 2 provides a speedrun-like tutorial with speed leaderboard that’s so engaging that players can spend hours just trying to improve their time on the tutorial.
- Hearthstone provides puzzles and matches against bots in a narrative context.
- Portal is a whole game of learning in scripted puzzles & narration.
- Forza Horizon starts with a demo showcase that allows you to quickly discover the various aspects of the game.
In the end, what is your game? Which approach best suits your situation? Discuss the various approach with other design families to come up with the best solution for your specific game.
Adapt To Your Players
There are basically 3 ways to adapt to your players:
- Make a base game with a great onboarding, usability & accessibility.
The main choice for everything.
- Provide optional choices & adaptation features for players to adapt the game to them.
Typically used for difficulty and accessibility. It’s also used in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey to let players choose between Guided Mode and Exploration Mode depending on their player profile. It’s used it complex games to let players declare whether they are new to the genre, familiar or veteran to adapt the tutorial accordingly.
- Automatic detection
And here we come back to detecting the context and providing appropriate help. Is the player taking abnormal time to find the next step? Can we trigger an NPC that provides them with insight or any other contextual help?
Then you need to adapt to what constitutes players diversity, for instance:
- Identity
- Personality
- Physiology
- Habits
- Context
- Skills & Knowledge
- Emotions
Good preliminary user research can help you build strong fact-based clusters & player profiles to guide the conception process. Good playtesting will help you ensure you are detecting the right thing at the right moment and reacting accordingly.
Playtest Early & Often
We can start playtesting as early as conception phase and keep playtesting throughout the whole game development in pre-prod, prod, alpha, beta, early access, release and post-launch.
Low fidelity prototyping tools are instrumental in getting insights faster and more often:
- Paper
- Board Game
- Tabletop RPG
- Wireframe
- Mock-up
- Prototyping Tool
- Ugly Engine Simulation
Having a progressive feedback loop can also make sure you get tons of feedback on a regular basis:
- Peer Review
- Pluri-disciplinary Design Team Review
- Guerrilla Testing
- Playtesting
- Live Testing
Skipping directly to step 4 can be a sub-optimal use of money: you spent a lot of time & energy just to get feedback your peers could have easily given. A culture of feedback & ego-less design discussions does wonder to improve end-product quality.
Some mobile teams are easily able to perform all 5 steps in a month.
Don’t Forget Reboarding
Players can basically quit at any moment and come back weeks or months later. At that point, they probably lost some mechanical efficiency and forgot important parts of the story.
Simple well-designed features can make a huge difference:
- Difficulty Adaptation
- Quest Journal
- Cinematics & Story Recap
- Ability To Rewatch Cinematics
Think of it like the “Previously in […]” from TV Shows.
Reboarding experience is especially important in very long games like the MMORPGs. The better the reboarding experience, the more people will be able to follow along over the years. The worse the reboarding experience, the more people will drop over time. With a business model based on engagement, reboarding experience can make a huge difference.
Knowledge is Power
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