Nav and layout
(03.06.2007, 23:04:16) We are in a field where the ability to navigate quickly and easily are everything. Where players have little time to waste drilling down through 15 sub menus to get to the games more in-depth features or functions. So I pose this question for all the readers: If navigation and layout is so important for browsergames, why do so many sites have horrible layout or nav?
The simple answer is the developers don't think it is a problem. It's not that they can't make better navs,
it's just many don't believe it is important as functionality or 'game
play'. How the hell can someone say a browser based games gameplay isn't
effected by page layout and navigation? The game is purely navigation!
I understand not everyone who creates web games to be designers, but
this doesn't require a lot of design skills.
"How can we fix our nav/page
layouts Bardic?" you may be asking right now. Well I will share my
thoughts on it since you asked so nicely: Keep it simple. Really. There
is absolutely no need to have extreme animations, or hundreds of
graphic buttons. Simple text links that are positioned nicely on your
page with an obvious trait that defines them as links works great. But
this is only half of the problem.
Have to played a game where
you want to say, sell an item. And you need to make 5 or 6 clicks to
get to the necessary page? I hate that. I personally try to make all my
web sites, not just games, need no more than four clicks to find the
information that you want. Keeping the number of clicks needed to get
information isn't just a good site design idea, but is a good game
design idea. You want your players to be able to quickly perform
actions, gather information and interact with each other. Especially
interact with each other.
If it takes too much effort to communicate with each other players just won't do it.
So,
what do we have? Simple, clean, and as little clicks as possible. Not
that hard sounding, eh? But here arises another problem: Information
overload. When people think of making theirnav as few clicks as
possible, they have the tendency to make a 'city' page with about 20
links on it, which are ambiguous and poorly categorized. A good way to
organize a lot of links are rollover menus. Some may think they are
cheesy but they do organize the links and allows player to quickly skip
2 or 3 sub menus.
For those that are ambitious I have been
playing with the idea of a flash or javascript navigation system, where
clicking on a 'map' button brings up anav tree that would allows the
player to view all the site links at once and with one click take them
where ever they want. I haven't really seen this type ofnav implemented
anywheres, but the idea tickles my fancy. I would lean to flash for two
reasons: 1) I know flash far far better than javascript :P and 2) (the
real reason) is that a lot of people turn of javascript. The only
problem with the flash would be having it appear above the normal html/css site. But if I every find a way to do it properly I will share ^_^
But
there you have it. Nav and layout are important and shouldn't be
overlooked. Please argue with me in the comments. Or agree. But with
others input maybe we can discover a different view or approach. I
don't claim to be a god of PBBG design. Just a guy that has game design
and web design experience. So please! Comment!
Next week I'll have an article on communication in game, which I think is one of the most important features of any game...
See ya next week,
BardicKnowledge
Autor: Redaktion
