Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Chris Bam Harrison

When it comes to HUD, Less UI is more UX

Small changes can lead to massive results.

Have you ever played a game where you just felt like the UI was getting in the way? Too many info-panels, nameplates, inventories, chat logs, action bars, minimaps, health bars, blah, blah. Like this, basically:

I have played World of Warcraft for 14 years and I have no idea what is going on here.

Thanks to advanced modding capabilities, World of Warcraft used to be the posterchild for this sort of thing. As addons got more complex, gamers would add more and more information to their HUD (Heads-Up Display — it’s generally the term for UI that appears in your viewport).

This sort of thing is great for a highly-advanced raider who needs to know everything, right now. Or DCS enthusiasts. But for the rest of us, it’s just a mess.

On the other side of the coin, many games are opting for super-minimilist UI’s with little or no HUD whatsoever. There were a number of these in my UX Awards. This shot of Prey, for example:

Some thin text, a couple of health bars, and that’s about it.

That’s actually not what I want to look at today, though. This isn’t a minimilist vs maximilist (I think I just invented that term) argument. Rather, I want to talk about how almost any game can gain a better experience by removing some of their UI.

Just walk 5 paces, then turn toward the sun. Follow the trail of pebbles leading South-South-West…

A really common example of the ‘Less is More’ argument is the Elder Scrolls series. In earlier titles, a quest generally began with some explanatory text, and then it’s left up to the player to figure out what to do.

This often leads to the quest-giver saying stuff like “Go up the path, hang a right. If you see the polar bear you’ve gone too far”.

Some quests were rumoured to be about 12-pages long. Front and Back!

In it’s day, this was really the norm. Even the 2004 iteration of World of Warcraft did this, with instructions like ‘Go to Stranglethorn Vale and kill ten snakes’, even though Stranglethorn Vale was six kilometres long and only one very small patch of grass contained snakes. Jerks.

This often lead to player confusion if the instructions given weren’t good enough or the player simply got turned around or confused. As time has passed, World of Warcraft has implemented new map and guidance features to alleviate this issue, and will now rarely give detailed directions in the quest text. In turn, people often don’t read the text at all:

I trust him. He’s a talking Panda.

To carry the Elder Scrolls example, take a look at the compass at the top of this Skyrim screenshot that I stole from Pinterest:

Imagine finding the same copy-and-paste dungeons dynamically through exploration, instead of being led there by the minimap!

At any point in the game, the player has an awareness of nearby landmarks, discovered or undiscovered, as well as the exact direction to go to reach their quest.

This solves the approachability problem, sure. But the discovery element that the Elder Scrolls series was so famous for is not dead and buried. The magic of discovering a secret grotto or the panic of being snuck up on by some devious thieves is gone, thanks to your extra-sensory perception of your surroundings.

Skyrim wasn’t the first to do this, but it’s the most famous example because:

A. It sold really well, so presumably the change paid off.
B. it spawned about six-trillion mods all built to remove the HUD.

In fact, ImmersiveUI, a mod for Skyrim that hides the HUD is the 4th most popular UI mod of all time on NexusMods.

Similar arguments can be made for almost any game, really. Why does Call of Duty need an indicator to tell me when I’m crouching? Why does Far Cry feel the need to remind me of the driving controls every single time. I get into a vehicle, even if I’m 100 hours in? The list goes on.

Thankfully, games like Horizon: Zero Dawn have started adding customised options for UI, so the player can make a choice between the default, ‘accessible’ UI and a more customised experience. Even a ‘Dynamic’ choice for many elements that causes it to only be displayed when relevant. Take a look at these two clips — the first is the default UI, and the second is a minimalist version:

Long story short, there’s no right answer. Some players want all the information, some players want accessibility, and some players just want the UI to get out of the way. Customisation is the key.

Player Trust

One more small point — a really, really common argument against removing UI elements is that players won’t understand the game or know what to do.

Sometimes, that’s true. I’ll concede that it’d be really hard to play Starcraft II if you didn’t know how many minerals you had, or where your units were on the minimap.

But almost any achievment feels better when the user feels like they figured it out for themselves. It’s the same endorphin hit the first time you successfully change a tire, or cook a complex meal without burning it.

It used to be okay to let the user figure things out for themselves, and I think it’s time we let that happen more often.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

When it comes to HUD, Less UI can be more UX was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When it comes to HUD, Less UI can be more UX

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