Considering the user experience in serious game design

Serious games can be applied to any number of functions across all industries. They make great corporate training tools, highly effective mediums for education, and offer great utility in recruitment and onboarding. Today’s iterations are online, playable on any modern device, and seamless to integrate across digital channels and through QR codes, making them incredibly versatile. As tools to convey ideas and facilitate development, a well designed serious game is a profoundly effective innovation. However, like all great innovations, a serious game can only fulfil its potential if the user experience (UX) allows it to.

Defining user experience

Have you ever found a website impossible to navigate? Have you ever gone into a big store and not been able to find anything? Have you ever played a video game and found it full of bugs, or really counterintuitive? If enough people have the same difficulties, it could well be that the user experience aspect wasn’t paid due attention.

In broad strokes, user experience can be defined as how a user interacts with a system, service, or product. Does it do what it’s supposed to? Is it easy or pleasing to use? Is it effective?

What are the user experience requirements for a serious game to be successful?

A serious game is a game designed for a serious purpose. Serious games aren’t explicitly designed for fun, they’re designed to convey ideas, knowledge, and facilitate skill development. In short, their purposes are typically educational or training focused. If not designed and implemented thoughtfully, the user experience can compromise the desired educational or training outcome, and render the game pointless. For this reason, it’s important to consider the user experience from day one of serious game development.

In this article we’re going to run through some key considerations when designing your serious games. Whether you’re catering to students, employees, applicants, or the general public, you should always aim to deliver the best possible user experience to make your game effective. With a serious games platform like Drimify, the user experience elements related to coding and more technical aspects are taken care of for you, so this is centred around how to customise the existing game engines and tailor your content to achieve your goals.

Well thought out content

While some might think this goes without saying, there’s so much more to well thought out content than it just qualifying as “good content.” Say for example, you’re designing a serious game to help your employees learn about some new legislation that will be coming into effect in your industry. There could be long-form articles considering its effects and long-term ramifications, its pros and its cons. There’s the legislation itself, which could be incredibly dense and detailed. This could all be described as “good” in the sense that the legislation is quite literally the source, and the articles could feature contributions and interviews with industry leaders and academics, but how much of it do your employees need to know to do their jobs effectively?

Similarly, if you’re designing a playable online experience to help your secondary or high school students learn more about the historical context of the Elizabethan stage, it’s as important for you to know your audience as a game designer as it was for Shakespeare to know his as a playwright. Your students are in high school, so leave the heavy stuff in thesis-level academic tomes in the university library where they belong, and focus on bringing the late 1500s theatre scene to life. You want to connect your audience to the subject matter, and have them interact with it, not crush them under a bookshelf of academia.

Serious games, and programmes of serious game training, work because they’re interactive, engaging experiences. The content, be that in text or video format, needs to be short, punchy, and to the point. Consider in the first instance the bare bones of what you need to convey in your serious game, and customise the experience around what’s needed to fulfil that purpose.

The right amount of challenge

This is incredibly important. How would you feel playing chess against Deep Blue or a bona fide grandmaster? Or picking up a tennis racket for the first time and finding yourself on one of Wimbledon’s show courts. Probably variations of ridiculous and silly. If you’re playing a game where it’s impossible to win, it’s a very unengaging experience.

You need to put a lot of thought into who you’re designing your serious game for, no matter what type of serious game it is. If it’s in a business context, are they new to your company, or have they worked with you for a while? There is a level of challenge that encourages individuals to rise to the occasion, but making the difficulty level too high can just cause them to drop their head and give in. If serious games in a corporate context are too hard, particularly during the onboarding process, it can create an unnecessarily stressful experience for newer inductees to your business, and potentially affect retention rates.

Utilising a format like the Drimify platform allows you to constantly collect data and monitor how your serious games are performing. This means if you’re seeing lower scores than you expect, or they’re not quite delivering the expected outcomes, you can adjust your game’s difficulty through the content of the questions. Through your Drimify dashboard you can constantly adjust the amount of challenge across various modules of longer interactive courses, as well as stand alone training or engagement experiences.

Variety for engagement

This is especially important when designing a longer form serious game, such as if you were customising a Dynamic Path™ experience with multiple levels or modules. If every module takes the exact same format, it could become extremely repetitive and start to lessen the positive effect of serious games: effective engagement through interactivity and immersion.

It’s important to look at the various game engines across a gamification platform like Drimify to select the most appropriate ones for designing your game, be that a customised mini game, a tailored Quiz or Survey, or a multi-level learning pathway.

While some serious games might benefit from occasional mini games customised to reinforce learning outcomes, they won’t be appropriate for others that are perhaps on a more serious topic, or targeted at more senior members of staff. For example, if someone is participating in serious games as part of leadership development there is a particular level of focus and commitment that can be assumed, and a much greater emphasis on efficiency in getting them to the level they need to be at, as they can have such an enormous impact on the business. In these cases, variety is still important, and can be delivered by mixing up the answer formats for the Quiz modules. They can be adjusted to be open, multiple choice, or even ordered, if for example, you were looking for a player to prioritise a series of tasks or number the order of tasks to correctly follow a company process. You can also deliver levels of purely informative content, such as a slightly longer video, or more text, or could introduce levels looking for feedback and input. The latter seeks engagement still, but in a different way, and could even help in evaluating and improving your serious game in the long term.

A tested and seamless playing experience

Once you’re happy with your content, and everything has been considered from the user experience perspective, it’s important to play through the game thoroughly to look for bits that don’t quite work or could use improvement. You can plan your serious game following all the best advice, but still hit disconnects between the intent of your design and the end user experience. Playing through, and even having someone from your organisation who could test it before it gets rolled out within your company, is essential to ensure you’re delivering the best experience, and designing serious games that serve their end user and fulfil their purpose.

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