Visual feedback might be easily overlooked in the greater design scheme, but it actually hold the entire experience together. When there’s no feedback there’s no proper interaction. We as interaction designers must ensure that there is always some feedback for user actions, because it makes players feel in control.
While conducting a UI/UX audit for WWF, I identified two areas that required attention. The first instance was on the games screen (right), specifically on the "Your Move" list, which is a feature that enables players to view all the games that are waiting for them to play. The second and more significant issue was found on "Let's play" screen, where I discovered a critical pain point with the "Smart Match" (left,orange icon) option that it was directly impacting the user experience and potentially discouraging users from continuing to choose this option.
Each game on this screen is represented by a sort of card that contains information about your opponent; this card is interactive and serves as a link to the game board and even though this action serves the purpose on creating a link from this screen to the game board, there was not visual feedback of any kind and as we know in real life, buttons, controls and objects respond to our interaction, and this is how people expect things to work. Players expect a similar level of responsiveness from UI elements.
Just a simple animation like this pseudo 3d effect, made the experience complety different
This was the most critical case that most urgently needed a solution since it meant a major pain point in the players experience. In a correct interaction it is assumed that after executing an action, it is easy to determine the new state but in this case there was no continuous information about the results of that actions and the current state of the search. As a team we wrongly assumed that a simple switch between"play now..." to "Searching for an opponent" text would do the job, turns out we were wrong cause many players didn't know if the system was really looking for an opponent, or even worse many of them thought that the game had simply frozen.
Visual feedback is also helpful when we need to inform players about results of an operation. We can use existing elements to deliver a feedback, in this case the loading animation into a CTA.
In a perfect gaming world, objects react to our actions. Even the imaginary world of games should do the same. Players expect that UI elements respond to their activities. Our goal as designers is to ensure that the user receives feedback after acting. In case the game elements don’t give feedback, the player may be puzzled about whether the touch target is frozen or if it was a miss-click. Truly successful interaction design relies on a set of conventions, standards, best practices and rules-of-thumb, in this case of study I focused primarly on Feedback which is one of the most important interactions design principles.