Creating Passionate Users: If Tech Companies Made Sudoku

If Tech Companies Made Sudoku is a funny parody, but I think that ironically, it made me think the opposite.

I’ve gone through the experience a few times recently of “reskinning” a game that I have designed to the “blue squares” level: something ugly, but playable.

And it’s astonishing the difference in reactions and usability that pretty presentation can give. In the post and thread I liked, a lot of folks make fun of the idea of a Sudoku game where putting in the right number is rewarded with a shower of pretty particles, or of the idea of a skinnable interface for the game. But those are often good ideas, because they strike at the heart of usability.

I did a puzzle game once where you were trying to make quadrants of a board be symmetrical. I originally designed it on an actual board, with glass beads. Once I had it working there, I did a version on the computer. When I made it pretty, I put in glass beads and a wooden board. It felt very mellow.

But the mechanics demanded a time clock per move. Mellow was not the right vibe. When I reskinned it (and I rewrote it at the same time, redoing all the code top to bottom), I changed the art dramatically. I changed from glass beads to gems and then to various other things that suggested wealth: pearls, gold rings, and so on. I added little particles when you placed a bead correctly. At the suggestion of playtesters, I changed the way the game worked when you reached the end of a level — before, the level ended as soon as you ran out of beads. After, you had to do a specific task to beat the level: complete one more set of symmetry. You were rewarded with a shower of particles shaped like whatever you had just built.

These purely cosmetic things dramatically enhanced the fun of the experience, and the usability of the game, because they provded cues.

Now, looking at the actual cartoon Sierra made, it’s clear some of the comments scribbled on are stupid. Changing the font of the numbers in Sudoku is a bad idea — you need legibility above all. Making numbers disappear isn’t a crazy idea — the difficult Sudoku puzzles are in fact based on selectively presenting which numbers are visible and which not. Animating the lines subtly isn’t necessarily bad, but should be low priority — unless they can somehow cue when a row or column has in fact been completed correctly. Sound FX when you add a number seems to me like a must-have.

This doesn’t mean that Sierra’s underlying point is wrong; it’s far too eays to add too many bells and whistles and ruin something, just as it’s far too easy to rely solely on bells and whistles to dress up something unremarkable. The best way that I found to design was in fact to start with something as plain-looking as Sudoku, then iteratively add in the glitz and gloss, all the while watching users use the product. Some of that glitz and gloss is going to be necessary, but it’s best to start with unvarnished wood so you know you have the core functionality down.