UX review #5

Cuphead, or the paradox of the overly difficult video game

Octobre 2017 — week 44 — 🇫🇷 Version française disponible ici

Hello and welcome to the fifth article of my UX review ! I am Guillaume Tarsiguel, a French UX designer working in a company called Bloomin, and every week or so, I’ll share with you my thoughts on the news and trends of UX design, on the Internet and beyond.

On the menu of this week’s review : how UX can learn from video games, and keys to evangelize your company. Let’s get started with the review UX #5 !

💬 The debate of the week

Cuphead, or the paradox of the overly difficult video game

On late September, independent studio MDHR released Cuphead, a shoot-and-gun video game, whose visual and audios are inspired by cartoons of the 1930s. Thanks to its elaborate and immersive universe, Cuphead received a great reception from both the press and the public, selling at 1 million copies in less than 2 weeks.

Ingame screensht of Cuphead (courtesy of MDHR)

Despite its success, Cuphead raised some heated debates. The spark was an online article, written by video game journalist Dean Takahashi, in which he would complain of the difficulty of the game. He even shared a video showing his laborious, painful even, first steps playing Cuphead.

(estimated reading time : 5 minutes)

A portion of the video game press backed Takahashi opinion, arguing that Cuphead excessive difficulty was spoiling the pleasure of playing. It provoked an outcry from the gamers community, who found these critics unfair.

I must say I agree with the latter ; blaming a video game for its diffuclty doesn’t make sense to me : it all depends of the target audience.

A casual video game targetting by a large audience, is not better or less good than one that requires more skill and experience, these are simply two different ways of playing and enjoying video games, for two different audiences.

A too-friendly interface ?

Cuphead isn’t the first video game renowned for its difficulty. For example, Dark Souls is the archetype of a hard game, yet it did not suffer the same critics from the press. I think the reason is that, at first glance, Dark Souls’ graphics are not very user-friendly ; Dark Souls actually looks difficult.

Ingame screenshot of Dark Souls

On the contrary, Cuphead marketing aimed a broader audience. Moreover, its cute cartoon-like graphics might have mislead some casual players into thinking the gameplay would also be sweet and easy — how wrong !

To be easy, or not to be easy, that is not the question

I reckon the current debate on Cuphead difficulty echoes wider UX problematics, ie when an human computer interface is described as too complex to use. Here again, it only depends on the target audience.

For example, it’s okay for a professionnal tool to not be accessible to everybody -in fact, it sould require some base-level skills from the users, so it can perform more complex actions. Of course, such an interface does not suit the average layman, but that is not a problem.

Is a plane cockpit too compex ? Maybe for most of us, but not for an airline pilot — for whom the cockpit was designed in the first place

UX design and video game

This Cuphead case study is one of the many lessons video games can teach to UX designers.

Indeed, our everyday human-computer interface serves an objective, an action to accomplish : ordering food with UberEats, chatting with friends with Whatsapp, check one’s bank balance with bank apps, etc. It is because there is such an objectie that users are ready to put up with ill-conceived interfaces.

This is how a video game is fundamentaly different ; it’s a pure human-computer interface, which is no longer a means but an end in itself. There is no action to accomplish outside the video game experience, the pleasure is entirely in the way of interacting. Hence, there’s nothing stopping a user from turing off its console as soon as they don’t enjoy themself.

So, video game design does not allow any form of bad user experience. And that is why, as a UX designer, I always keep an eye on the world of video games. There is a lot to learn from it, and it has even been miles ahead in numerous UX design fields, such as user testing and gamification 🎮

📄The article of the week

How to evangelize your company into believing in UX design

(in French, estimated reading time : 5 min)

However trendy UX design seems to be nowadays, at least in the job market, the reality is not always as great as it seems. Indeed, the role of UX design is still difficul to grasp for people who are not familiar with it, notably in France. In some companies, UX designer is just a title behind which the actual work is really one of a graphic or web designer, product manager, or web integrator.

The article of this week, by UX-Republic, adresses this issue, making a clear and concise summary of the book “User Experience Revolution” by Paul Boag. Here are his 4 keys to evangelize your company to UX design :

Use striking examples to shake up the status-quo

Build a team of UX aficionados

Share your finds and inspirations around you — like I do with my UX reviews !

Pick a small project, and do it from A to Z

I am personnally glad to be, at Bloomin, in a company that values UX design within the conception of a product. Ideation workshops, user research, prototype testing, etc. : within the available ressources that we have, we conduct as many stages of the UX design process as we can in order to offer the best user experience possible.

It’s obvious then than UX design is not meant to make UX designers feel happy and needed ; there is a real positive impact on the users, the product, and by extension on the company in itself.