Creating a Better User Interface for Beginners in World of ...



Creating a Better User Interface for Beginners in World of Warcraft

by Stephen Cano

Introduction:

As their popularity increases and technology continues to focus around them, computer games are becoming a larger and larger focus of user interface research. One of the most popular games on the market today, so much so that it could be argued to be a cultural phenomenon, is World of Warcraft. A product of Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft, known as “WoW’ for short, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG, which focuses around the fantasy world of Azeroth. The game’s popularity can be attributed to many factors, such as addictive gameplay, an easy learning curve, and colorful and exciting worlds. The game also features something many online games do not – an open-source library for interface add-ons and modifications.

While the game comes with a solid interface which can be used from early play to late-game usage, many players find themselves downloading and installing add-ons created by the online community in order to change and enhance the default Blizzard UI. The default UI does not provide the power and customization necessary for many end-game players, and arguably, many low-level and early players. The goal of this study is to see how a few simple add-ons can greatly improve the default Blizzard UI and to examine what it is these elements bring to gameplay that the Blizzard UI does not. Insight into this specific case could lead to discussion on improvement of future UIs for other games.

Overall, the goal of this project is to find what elements of computer game interface are important to the user through comparing and contrasting a created user interface to an existing game interface. The results will hopefully be applicable not only to the World of Warcraft game, but also to other ventures into interface design for computer games.

Previous Work:

The aim of this project is to find what elements of WoW’s interface currently “work” and which can be improved on, or in a larger scope, what elements of game interfaces users find more helpful and less helpful via comparison. While specific educational ventures into World of Warcraft have not focused on the interface (but instead on the dynamics of an online community and other such psychological studies), much work has been done in trying to develop heuristics for computer game interfaces. Most studies focus on what makes the game and the interface fun and enjoyable, as well as easily used by the player.

In the research done at the University of Piraeus[1], evidence shows that users of all skill levels tend to gravitate toward using a more “fun” and visually impressive interface when presented with the option. This study was done by presenting young students two different interfaces for an educational program: both functionally equivalent but one more colorful and animated (while being potentially less straight-forward in its usage). Users of both gender ended up not only preferring the more aesthetically pleasing interface, but also used it more efficiently. Many existing interface packages for World of Warcraft are not only useful, but clean and sleek, presenting a less cluttered UI in often a visually satisfying way. In this study, the UI created should aim to be both impressive looking and impressively useful.

Finding a way to develop heuristics to measure playability of a game is also a dilemma this particular project faces. While the survey results feature a lot of non-numerical responses in order to get a grasp on how much the participants liked or disliked the interface, the most convincing arguments usually come through heuristic values. In their paper for the CHI’04 conference[2], a group of researchers came up with an interesting set of heuristics in order to examine the overall playability of a game. Most of their heuristics were questions one would normally ask users, but presented them as a list of issues that the participants used as a checklist. Each time the user faced an issue listed, they marked it off of the list. The checks were tallied and could be summed together at the end of a study as a score for each area of the gameplay. While a similar list was not used for this study, the study gave some insight on how to handle non-numerical data used in this study and also what type of questions should be asked to the participants.

The Improved Beginner UI:

The interface created for this study is a compilation of previously existing add-ons for the game that were downloaded from various WoW communities on the internet. Custom UIs were avoided in favor of pre-made add-ons due to their previous testing and debugging. In other words, these add-ons have been used by many players and therefore should be fairly “bug-free”, removing the need for rigorous testing of custom add-ons. The add-ons used for this case included the following:

▪ Improved Error Frame - hides any UI errors in a neat package that can be accessed via a button on the player’s minimap

▪ ArkInventory - an all-in-one bag mod that allows better visual of all the bags a player owns, as well as options to scale, move, and alter the bag menu, as well as view your bank and other characters' inventories.

▪ Bartender 3 - an action bar mod that replaces the Blizzard default action bar. These bars are fully scalable and moveable, and up to 10 bars can be displayed simultaneously

▪ CooldownCount - this mod puts actual numbers on the player’s bars after they cast something that has a cooldown, letting the player know exactly how much time they have left (as opposed to the “cooldown circle” normally used)

▪ DeuceCommander - an all-in-one option menu, so all add-on options are in one place

▪ Dr.Damage - Allows the player to see an estimate of how much dmg/healing each spell on their bar does

▪ FuBar/BagFu/ExerienceFu - a small bar that provides stats for the player, such as percentage of total experience and remaining inventory space.

Images of the interface compared to the Blizzard UI can be found in the appendix of this paper. All of these add-ons can be found at .

Study Design and Procedure:

The intended audience for the Improved Beginner’s UI is, of course, novice players of World of Warcraft. However, it also could be used by expert players who are starting new characters and do not need all the necessary overhead of add-ons used for end-game dungeons and raiding. Therefore, the study group for this study consists of players in a range of novice to expert players. Participants were found on the North American “Malfurion” server, and are all residents of either the United States or Canada. Two female and four male participants took part in the study, ranging in age from 19 to 30. Their experience playing WoW ranged from 2 months to 3 years, and all participants are currently active subscribers to the game.

Volunteers were recruited from guild webpage forums, with knowledge that there was no compensation involved and that statistics would be used for academic purposes. Each user supplied their email address, and after volunteering were mailed a package of files including the interface, pre-made settings, instructions for installation, study instructions, and a post-study survey for statistic gathering. Volunteers were asked to thoroughly read all provided instructions and ask any questions before beginning the study. After following installation instructions (which also involved saving their current UIs), participants were asked to play with the interface for a maximum of 30 minutes, and could stop at any time if they felt frustrated or uncomfortable. Participants were also asked to play on a character who was between the levels of 1 and 40, even if this means creating new character (the game “caps” character advancement at level 70, so this was deemed beginner to midrange, and if necessary character creation is a fast and easy process in the game). After finishing their playtime, participants filled out a brief 1.5 page survey on their opinions of the interface, along with various other questions for statistical purposes.

Data:

Participants were asked to grade four different aspects of the UI, as well as giving an overall grade, on a 1 to 10 scale. The following are the results:

|Participants |1 |

|Ease of Use |-0.34922 |

|Action Bars |1.690309 |

|FuBar/Information |2.963189 |

|Inventory |4.427189 |

|Overall |3.369263 |

Data Analysis:

The results from this study were split into two different groups: heuristic ratings of the new UI and questions regarding comparisons of the two UIs. The heuristics values show that, on its own, the new UI was found to be fairly favorable by the participants. On a scale of 1 to 10, all of the main elements of the UI averaged above a 7, with the inventory mod and general ease of use rating the highest among them all. Combined with the questions asked to each participant, it can be concluded that the inventory mod was the most enjoyed aspect of the new UI, while the FuBar information bar was found to be the least successful

The T-test show that the pieces of the UI that had the most impact on the test group was the inventory mod and the FuBar mod. This is surprising, though, because as later discussed, the FuBar seemed to have little impact otherwise. This is the one piece of data that could be contested due to its contrasting nature between statistics, so we draw little conclusion from it. The action bars and ease of use of the new UI had little impact on the overall statistics, as can be seen by the low T-test numbers (a t-test score of over 1.96 considers the data “relevant”).

The comments made about the general aesthetics of the new UI over the Blizzard UI gave interesting insights. Many of the participants commented that the Blizzard UI had a lot of “flair” and fantasy feel to it, but cluttered up too much of the screen. Instead of wanting a UI that itself was colorful, the users preferred to see more of the “action” and less of the action bars and interface elements. The fact that the new action bars had a reduced size compared to the Blizzard UI bars were generally accepted as a good thing, since this gave more room for users to space out their UIs. Also, the single bag add-on was preferred over Blizzards multi-bag menu because it cluttered up less of the screen and was scalable to the users’ preferences.

Along the same lines, most users found that the FuBar mod did not provide enough useful information to take up the room on the screen that it did, according to the comments. Most users appreciated the information but would have rather have put it somewhere else on the screen. Some users also commented on the lack of change for the player frame, which gives the player life totals and “mana” totals as well as a picture of their character. The participants mostly like the Blizzard frame, which was left untouched for this study, but said that they would have liked to see if that information could be displayed in a more interesting fashion.

Conclusion:

The goal of this study was to provide insight into what interface elements could be improved upon in the Blizzard UI and how this impacts design for other games. The results from this study show that generally players in an MMORPG such as World of Warcraft prefer to have a user interface that does not clutter up the screen while still providing useful information. They also liked flexibility of elements, such as scalability of action bars and menus, as well as the ability to move these pieces around their screen.

One of the big winners was the inventory UI, ArkInventory. Most users did not even explore the deeper ability of the add-on (such as inventory sorting and categorizing), but just the simple idea of putting all 5 “bags” of a player’s inventory into one menu, instead of 5 separate menus, was favored highly. Blizzard’s original intent for the bag menu was to have it feel “natural” that the character would open each bag separately. While this elements of realism could be useful for real-life applications, in the realm of gameplay users preferred to ignore this “realism” and have a cleaner, single-bag approach.

Users did not like elements that took up too much of the screen without providing useful information. In this study, an “informational bar”, FuBar, was added to the screen. Many users expressed disinterest or dislike of this particular addition. Perhaps if more pieces of data were added to this bar, it would be seen as more useful, but in its current state it should be removed.

Overall, the data from this study shows that the current Blizzard UI is not as good as it could be, despite the wild success of the game. It was a wise idea for them to keep the interface open for add-ons and modifications, since users have found numerous ways to improve their UI, mostly through un-cluttering the screen and providing an easier way to scale and move the interface as suited for the player.

References:

▪ Maria Virvou, George Katsionis, Konstantinos Manos; On the motivation and attractiveness scope of the virtual reality user interface of an educational game; University of Piraeus, Greece, 2004 ()

▪ Heather Desurvire, Martin Caplan, Jozef A. Toth; Using Heuristics to Evaluate the Playability of Games; Conference on Human Factors in Computer Science; Vienna, Austria, 2004 ()

Appendix:

|Did you have more control over |1 |No |

|the gameplay with the Improved UI? | | |

| |2 |Yes |

| |3 |Not more control, but more information |

| |4 |Yes |

| |5 | |

| |6 | |

|Which UI’s aesthetics do you prefer? |1 |Improved |

| |2 |Blizzard |

| |3 |Blizzard |

| |4 |Improved |

| |5 |Improved |

| |6 |Didn’t have a preference |

|Favorite feature of the default Blizzard UI? |1 |# of available buttons |

| |2 |Ease of use |

| |3 |Grouping of spells |

| |4 |None |

| |5 |None |

| |6 |Ease of use |

|Favorite feature of the Improved UI? |1 |Size of buttons |

| |2 |Inventory mod |

| |3 |Inventory mod |

| |4 |Inventory and action bars |

| |5 |Inventory mod, action bars |

| |6 |Inventory mod |

|Least favorite feature of the Blizzard UI? |1 |Size of buttons |

| |2 |Lack of “basic” functions |

| |3 |Action bars |

| |4 |Inventory menu |

| |5 |Action bars |

| |6 |Inventory menu |

|Least favorite feature of the Improved UI? |1 |XP bar positioning |

| |2 |FuBar |

| |3 |User frames should be redone as well |

| |4 |FuBar |

| |5 |Lack of aesthetics |

| |6 |Action bars |

|Which UI would you use, if given the option? |1 |Improved UI |

| |2 |Blizzard UI |

| |3 |Improved UI |

| |4 |Improved UI |

| |5 |Improved UI |

| |6 |Blizzard UI |

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[1] Maria Virvou, George Katsionis, Konstantinos Manos; On the motivation and attractiveness scope of the virtual reality user interface of an educational game; University of Piraeus, Greece, 2004 ()

[2] Heather Desurvire, Martin Caplan, Jozef A. Toth; Using Heuristics to Evaluate the Playability of Games; Conference on Human Factors in Computer Science; Vienna, Austria, 2004 ()

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[pic]

The default Blizzard UI, with all bags open, on a lvl 25 Shaman

[pic]

The Improved Beginner’s UI, with bags open

[pic]

The Improved Beginner’s UI after entering the game as a level 1 character

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