"How not to design a game UI" by Darien feat. Bioshock
Admit it. You can’t get enough of me bitching about video games, and, specifically, about Bioshock. Amirite? Amirite?? Of course Iamrite. We’re going to go a bit in-depth about Bioshock’s UI here, and why it’s not very good and what should be done differently. Before we get going, let’s get one thing clear: Bioshock is a fun game. I’m not some sort of crazy Bioshock-hater or on the payroll of competing companies or any other weird internet conspiracist. I like the game, I think everybody should have bought it this weekend when it was on sale for $15, and it does a lot of things that other companies could learn from.
And it does a lot of things that other companies should be very careful not to emulate.
Let’s start with the game’s options windows:
This is actually pretty much fine. The buttons are well-designed controls for the functions they perform, the sliders do what you think they’ll so, everything pretty much works. There’s a lot of whitespace, but there isn’t really anything it could be filled with, so no big deal. Notice the "Apply" and "Discard" buttons at the bottom ("Cancel" would be better than "Discard," but no big deal) — they do exactly what you think they’d do.
The Control Options screen, though, is a little odd:
The first thing to observe is that the "Customise Keys" button has been added to the bottom along with Apply and Discard, even though it doesn’t perform a related function. This isn’t very good design; users should be able to expect consistency in the OK and Cancel buttons (or equivalent).
The next thing to observe is that pressing the Customise Keys button pops up the nag box shown — the way the interface is structured, the Customise Keys menu is a submenu of Control Options. There is no other way to get there. When was the last time you saw a submenu that couldn’t be opened without resetting the options on the menu it’s nested under? That notwithstanding, why on earth can’t the Control Options menu just save its state before opening the Customise Keys menu? Also worth noting is that the nag box always displays when you press Customise Keys — even if you haven’t made any changes to the Control Options.
Also, the two visible options in that screenshot are badly arranged. They’re both disabled in this instance because I don’t have an Xbox 360 controller plugged into the PC — the "Vibration" setting can’t be enabled if you’re not using a 360 controller, but it doesn’t give any indication of this; it should be shown as subordinate to the 360 controller option, but it seems like it’s totally seperate.
Then let’s look at the key bindings:
The first thing you’ll notice on this screen is the giant yellow arrow pointing at the "Default Bindings" button. I cannot tell a lie: I added the arrow; it’s not actually part of the Bioshock UI. The reason I added the arrow is to call your attention to a little detail the UI designers didn’t think was important: they replaced the "cancel" button you would reasonably expect to be in that location with a button that has an amazingly destructive effect on anything you might have done on this menu. What they’ve done here, therefore, is replace a button that means "close this menu without changing anything" with a button that means "undo all the changes I’ve ever made on this menu — not just on this visit, but on any visit." Unlike the big nag prompt for opening this menu, there’s no confirmation required to destroy your custom settings. This also means there’s no way to cancel out of this menu — you need to save the changes you’ve made or reset it to factory defaults.
Now check out this clip from the video settings:
Quick — what does the "Distortion" setting do? Don’t bother hovering your mouse over it and waiting for a tooltip, because my screenshots don’t have them. Which makes them exactly like actual Bioshock interface. To increase the confusion, the manual doesn’t tell you either, which means your only recourse if you want to know what the options do is to Google it.
Also noteworthy is that "Force Global Lighting" is a bit of an ugly duckling — every other setting can be basically thought of as "turn on for more fancier, turn off for better performance." Force Global Lighting, however, works the other way around — Off is the high-quality setting.
It’s not just the options menu, though:
If you open the subscreen during play, you’re greeted with that control. I’ll give you that it’s fairly obvious which button opens the map, but the other options — Goals, Help, and Messages — are a bit less clear. I usually end up just buttoning through them until I find the one I want rather that trying to remember them. The Help screen is the one with the question mark, which would make sense, except that they thoughtfully enclosed the question mark in a speech balloon, making me think it’s Messages. The other two symbols don’t particularly mean anything to me — unless they’re going for a World of Warcraft quest parallel with that exclamation point — and I have a hard time even figuring out what the reel-to-reel tape actually is. Again, tooltips would be useful here, kids.
One more thing:
Text from Bioshock’s help system. No points for guessing whether or not those functions are actually unbound — you can’t tell from this screenshot, of course, since the game doesn’t appear to be able to tell and reports them as unbound no matter what.
