Forget the iPhone. Get a Nintendo DS (Part 2).
by Jason LiThe Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, is a action-adventure game for the Nintendo DS in which you control a blond adventurer with a pajama cap and sword (pictured below) using a touch-screen stylus. I was playing it the other day when…
My fairy sidekick told me that I should try “pressing” the seal from a map I just had discovered in a dungeon (displayed on the top screen) to my map (displayed on the bottom screen).
I remembered that several hours ago, I had to scratch a secret spot on the map to reveal another seal. So I spent five minutes aligning the two maps, then scratching and tapping on the touch-screen with my stylus. Unfortunately, this did not “press” the seal onto my screen.
Next I tried drawing the seal onto my own map complete with meticulous shading. Still no reaction. Frustrated, I tried to direct my character out of the map room. But my sidekick fairy barred my exit, turned me around and repeated that all I needed to do was “press” the seal onto my map.
Ten minutes of scratching and tapping later, I was about to give up: I imagined the triumphant feeling of closing shut my DS and tossing it into a corner. Then I realized, “Wait a second, if I close my DS then the two screens (or maps) will touch!”
Scared that it might power off my game, I carefully closed the lid of my DS.
I waited.
The green power light winked. My heart fluttered. I opened it back up — puzzle solved.
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Looking for interaction design inspiration? Forget the iPhone. Get a Nintendo DS.
(Tom Armitage alluded to this interaction in his comment to my last post.)
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October 15th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
[...] Alex Taldren wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, is a action-adventure game for the Nintendo DS in which you control a blond adventurer with a pajama cap and sword (pictured below) using a touch-screen stylus. I was playing it the other day when … [...]
October 18th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
What a great anecdote. It inspires me to think carefully about the user actions that I ask for from the user. Will they understand my language? Am I using conventions or just making random stuff up?
In this one the game wanted you to transfer information from one document to another - but used language that was so in the metaphor that you couldn’t possibly follow it!
Part of the fun of Zelda is working out how the totally immersive metaphor translates to the reality of a little plastic box with buttons. But doing this kind of interaction design in an e-commerce application would be a huge mistake.
Thanks for the story!
October 31st, 2007 at 6:59 am
Wasn’t that amazing? I spent about half an hour on it, trying every possible thing I could think of at least a dozen times, before finally bracing myself to close the DS. But the thing that I thought was amazing about it was that the next time, I’ll close the DS right away. They’ve actually opened up a new possibility in my store of ways of interacting with my DS. It’s really simple, it’s really obvious (once you’ve done it), and it’s totally new. Go, Nintendo!
And the reason I know that next time I’ll know better is that the first time I encountered the need to blow into the microphone, I was completely mystified. The second time, I did it right away. Another example of how Nintendo is changing the way we interact with the machine!
I remember reading a pre-review of the iPhone that questioned whether people were going to adapt to using a stylus and thinking then that the writer clearly wasn’t a game-player. Once you start using a DS, pressing little buttons (like those on a telephone) stops making sense at all.
November 1st, 2007 at 10:15 am
It occurred to me (belatedly) that the other great thing about the way Nintendo did this was that they made it impossible for you to do anything other than figure it out. You couldn’t go forward, you couldn’t go backward: you were stuck at that spot until you tried something new. I think that was the only thing that prevented me from searching out a walkthrough to figure it out–they’d set it up so that trying everything you could think of–and then expanding the number of things you could think of!–was the only thing you could do. The user had to get it eventually, because there was no other choice. (Of course, it helped that the directions, no matter how radical, were completely clear.)