The gaming industry is growing at an exponential rate. With more and more games coming up every season, it is essential to match some standards to keep up with the competitors. Since it’s all about an amazing ‘gaming experience’ these days, there are certain gaming UX design practices that need to be kept in mind before you move on to the next step of development. In this comprehensive guide, we have covered all the top practices of an elegant gaming UX design in detail. This is purely based on what gamers love these days with data for ameliorating user engagement, retention, and most importantly, experience!

5 best Gaming UX Best Practices Worth-Trying

Given below are some insightful practices that must be a part of your game design journey!

1. Handling Simple Pop-ups

These pop-ups may indicate general game information or performance details. Some of its best practices include:

• Make use of a semi-transparent background that is dim in color. In this way, players can easily see some background portions as well.
• Don’t use X for closing the informative pop-ups. Since you want the players to read these pop-ups, you need to prevent adding X on the top right. This is essential to avoid the haphazard closing of the pop-up by players. It is also a sign of good UI practice.

2. Handling Draggable objects

In popular games such as Solitaire Bliss, most game assets are PNGs that can be dragged to perform a necessary game operation. Some key aspects to take care of here just as you would drag an item in the real world scenario are:

• Designers must fix an anchor point offset so that they can be easily dragged without any issues.
• The dragged item should be kept on top of other items while being dragged.
• Always use a dashed outline or glow line to highlight the drop-zone space.

3. Pop-ups to handle user choices

Games use a myriad of pop-ups to deal with user decisions. So, to make it easier for the players to quickly take action, here are some simple standards that must be applied every time you add a pop-up in your game. Also, you need to remember them at your fingertips to stay ahead of all the things and build games seamlessly.

• All good user decisions are included on the right side of your popup. To quote an example: all options such as confirming an in-game purchase or sharing game performance on social handles are placed on the right side. To further make it even more prominent, you can highlight it with a green color.
• The negative or bad user decisions must be present on its left side. To explain with an example: all options such as reset game progress, quitting the game, etc. are placed on the left side. To make it simpler, keep the button’s color red.

4. Sliders

Since you can easily have an idea of changing screen resolution, it is extremely crucial to use sliders. They come in handy to help the players navigate through all site content without missing any important information. As UX designers, it is your responsibility to help players use a slider correctly. So, here are some key tips to help you watch the screen using a slider even if your device screen ends after a few inches:

• Keep some of the slider content partly visible so that the player understands the need to slide through the screen to access it. This is a necessary tactic to keep the players notified about the pending content that needs to be seen by sliding the screen.
• Use animations extensively to help the players slide through the screen. It can be done either by launching the animation at the end of a crucial content element when sliding horizontally or in the case of vertical; a slider may start automatically once the player reaches a certain point on the screen with the help of animation. There can also be an option of pressing the upward or downward arrow to indicate more content below.

5. Ads in the gaming industry are rewarding

Everyone loves a free upgrade by watching a few seconds of an ad video. They help in generating great revenue even on a free-gaming model. Thus, the users play games for free while the gaming company earns from the ads played in between the gameplay. Game UX designers must take care of some of the noteworthy things to handle ads in a better way that doesn’t affect the user’s gaming experience in any manner such as:

• Using a film clapper board icon to indicate users about a video ad that has a free reward associated with it.
• Choose your reward wisely so that users are invoked to watch the video ad to earn the reward. Some prize rewards are permanent; it means that the reward will be added to the game’s inventory forever (until the player decides to use it in the game). Others are timed rewards which mean that they are available only during that given session to help you get extra time during that game. Next comes the one-level rewards. They are used to getting one more chance or some game booster.
• It is essential to keep the rewards extravagant to capture the player’s attention in the best way. Remember: If the rewards are insignificant to what users actually require, they will never click the video ads button.

The Bottom Line

By now, you must be aware of the top gaming UX design practices mentioned above and how they are working their magic to capture the attention of gamers from around the world. Thus, now it’s your time to keep all these practices in mind while creating a creative layout for your gaming idea. Incorporate all of them and you will instantly feel that your design has amped up a notch.