UX/UI Design

Why Your Team Should Use Lo-fi Prototypes When Making Games: Part 1. The Value of Prototyping

Hi! My name is Andrey Lapin, and I am a UI/UX designer on the Jewels of Rome project at G5 Games. This is the first article in the series about game development and interface design in games. I will convey the experience of our team and tell you how we work and make successful games with an audience of 1,000,000 people per month.

Introduction

Prototyping can be compared to building a hypersonic car — you have a standardized set of parts, components, and buttons, but it’s still a complex and challenging task. You imagine a shiny, beautiful, and speedy car, but how do you know you’ve built it right? How do you know that your creation won’t fall apart along the way and turn your work months (and sometimes years) into an unsustainable product? The answer to that question would be simple — you followed processes and controlled the quality of the design at every step of your game’s production. Of course, following processes doesn’t guarantee the product’s success, but your chances of getting a decent result are significantly increased.

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Is There Anything More Important Than Lo-fi Prototypes?

G5 Games has a huge number of projects, each with its own autonomy. Development teams have spent years battling over questions of ideal processes, but one of the most important discoveries we came to was pretty trivial: don’t ignore or skip research and quality prototyping because these steps can save you thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars over the long haul. And yes, even if all deadlines are burning, it’s better to make design decisions based on incomplete information than no information at all. If you, as an interface designer yourself, don’t know what screen players are seeing at any given time, you’re offering your users an inconsistent product where the user journey is created on the fly. The main goal is to make the game so that it pays back the development costs, maximizes player entertainment, evokes emotion, and generates revenue for at least a few years. Without properly built prototyping and design processes for your product, it will become much more difficult to get predictable results.

Over the years, our team has adapted the value pyramid that we use to create and prototype game interfaces. The value pyramid explains the hierarchy of our users’ needs but not the sequence of steps for making design decisions. Just remember that without closing the basic user needs, moving up can be risky. Your product may be very, very entertaining, but if it can’t be used by a wide range of people, the result may disappoint you.

According to the value pyramid, there are a few key principles:

Functionality: I’m certain no one would argue that an application should perform its main task without fail. This is the basis without which everything else would either work badly or not work at all. Users can easily interact with essential product features in a functional interface to complete their tasks efficiently.

Reliability: The second important step is a fail-safe and stable operation and a guaranteed response from the interface according to user expectations. Users should have confidence that the application will not disappoint them and frequently repeated actions will be completed with the same success in all situations.

Usability: A good interface is an intuitive interface for use by players with different levels of gaming experience, effective at solving user problems, and easy to learn. Beginners and experienced players alike understand and take to a user-friendly interface.

Accessibility: The next important factor is ensuring that the interface can be used by all people, including those with special needs or health limitations. This may also include elderly individuals with visual impairments. Accessibility includes concepts such as inclusive design but is not limited to them.

Engagement: A good interface attracts and retains players’ attention. A great casual game is not just about graphics but also gameplay and interface. It’s impossible to imagine any popular game for the mass market that only has buttons and lacks engaging gameplay. In our products, we always incorporate popular, time-tested market mechanics and events that engage users in the game or motivate them to keep playing.

Emotional Connection: While an interface may not always directly influence emotions, it can enhance the overall impression of your product. The interface should evoke positive emotions and establish a connection with users, creating a sense of trust and satisfaction. This can be achieved through elements such as thoughtful and fluid animation of elements, trust marks on your forms, unobtrusive and quick micro-interactions, enjoyable narrative, engaging dialog, and empathy-inducing characters.

Delight and Surprise: Beyond the pyramid lies the principle of delight and surprise. This is the ultimate level of user emotion that adds extra value to your product. There’s nothing more uplifting than knowing that developers have taken care of your comfort in the game and thoughtfully considered every detail. At this level, in addition to meeting basic needs, the product and interface should exceed and surpass user expectations and provide delightful and unexpected moments that leave a lasting positive impression.

By utilizing these values, you can effectively communicate and convey the whole appeal of your product to your users. And in return, your users can be satisfied with a comprehensive and user-centered interface. For us as product developers, this means that they will come back again tomorrow because we offer them a unique experience.

How Lo-fi Prototypes Help Reduce Development Time and Save Money in Hypothesis Testing and Validation

Lo-fi, or low-fidelity prototyping, is a method of rapid product testing that involves creating simplified and low-tech representations of a product or interface. It allows designers to rapidly iterate and gather feedback early in the design process before investing significant time and resources into high-fidelity prototypes or the final product. Lo-fi prototypes are intentionally crude and devoid of complex details, instead focusing on communicating key concepts and interactions.

An example of a lo-fi prototype

Agreeing that discovering unexpected user behavior in your product during a release can be quite demotivating. I’m sure that if you have ever tested a product, you know what I’m talking about. And if you haven’t had a chance to test yet, then be prepared that you can expect a lot of discoveries (some of them may not be very pleasant). But not everything is so scary.

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Fortunately, you can solve many controversial and non-obvious design issues before the actual development begins. The good news for UI/UX designers is the emergence of lo-fi prototyping as a tool to test ideas and assess their effectiveness quickly. One of the advantages of lo-fi prototyping is its speed. Developers and game designers, with the help of a UI/UX designer, can quickly create and test different ideas, implementing changes on the fly as needed. Whether you decide this button shouldn’t be here or change your product concept altogether, lo-fi closes your needs for rapid product testing. This allows for a more iterative approach to game design, making refining and improving your game over time easier.

If you ask me the question, “Why should we implement lo-fi prototyping in our product?” I will try to convince you with a few arguments:

1. Speed and efficiency: Lo-fi prototypes can be created quickly and with minimal effort. They don’t require sophisticated design tools or extensive technical skills, allowing designers to quickly cycle through and test many ideas. This speed and efficiency make lo-fi prototyping ideal for early-stage proof of concept.
2. Team Involvement: Lo-fi prototypes encourage active team participation during testing sessions. Their simplicity and lack of detail help users feel more comfortable and free to provide feedback and suggestions.
3. Focus on key interactions: Lo-fi prototypes prioritize showcasing key interactions and the user journey while eliminating unnecessary details. Interface designers can finally pour themselves a cup of coffee, take a break from endlessly poring over wood colors on the shelf in the game shop, and focus on creating important and complex interfaces. Focusing on high-level interface architecture allows us to identify potential usability issues, gather feedback on the overall user experience, and make informed design decisions early in development. When I say “early,” I mean that your artists haven’t yet stretched their arms and pulled their tablets off the shelf, and your developers haven’t come to you to ask how the “close” button turns into a burger.
4. Cost-effective: Compared to high-precision hi-fi prototypes or the final product, lo-fi prototypes are cost-effective advantages in both conceptual development time savings and potential error costs. Moreover, lo-fi prototypes are accessible to everyone. They can be drawn on paper, on a whiteboard, or quickly sketched in Figma. This affordability allows you to test and improve many design concepts without a substantial financial investment. Other than paying for your designer’s time, of course.
5. Iterative Improvement: Lo-fi prototyping promotes an iterative approach to design. Lo-fi doesn’t just facilitate but forces you to take small steps from point to point while collecting feedback from your team. With this approach, well-planned design sprints enable your designers to process feedback swiftly, make necessary adjustments, and sometimes even create radically new prototype versions for further testing. This iterative process helps identify and fix usability issues, validate design assumptions, and improve the product from idea to release.
6. Collaboration and communication: Lo-fi prototypes serve as effective communication tools, fostering discussions and collaboration among team members, stakeholders, and users. Moreover, the iterativity from the previous point will encourage the whole team to discuss the finished product. The overall simplicity of the prototype, with only the basic details, makes it easier for everyone to understand and contribute, leading to better collaboration and harmonization of design decisions.

The most important rule of lo-fi prototypes is that the earlier you seek assistance from your designer, the more money and time your product will save on potential rework.

What Troubles Can Await a Product if Lo-fi Prototyping is Skipped or Performed Poorly

Skipping or poorly performing lo-fi prototyping during the product development process can lead to a number of problems. In some cases, your product will never recover from them again. Here are some of the problems your product may face:

1. Lack of user information: Utilizing lo-fi prototypes allows you to test and gather valuable information from users early in the development process. By skipping this step, you miss the opportunity to understand the user’s needs, preferences, and pain points. As a result, the final product may not meet user expectations, resulting in low user satisfaction. Unsatisfied users have one disadvantage — they quickly move to play in competitors’ products. If you don’t know what language your users speak or, even worse, have no idea at all who your product is for — be sure that sooner or later, you will water down the functionality of your product in an untargeted way, resulting in financial losses.
2. Inefficient iteration: Lo-fi prototypes allow for rapid iterations and refinements that come from many different directions. Without embracing this iterative process, you can end up wasting substantial time and resources developing a product that later requires significant changes or redesigns or is not needed by users at all. Sudden and unplanned insights always lead to only one thing: delayed release, increased costs, frustration, and potential burnout among development team members.
3. Unclear functionality: Lo-fi prototyping helps clarify and confirm the product’s core functionality. If this step is skipped, there is an increased risk of misunderstanding and miscommunication about the product’s functions and interactions at all stages. Inconsistent or incomplete functionality in the final product leads to confusion, frustration, and user dissatisfaction. And as you remember, unsatisfied users go to the place where they understand better — competitors’ games.
4. Usability problems: Lo-fi prototypes help you identify usability and user interface problems early in the design process. By neglecting this step, you may overlook critical usability issues that can negatively impact the usability of the product and the overall user experience. The hint button could be positioned too closely to the close button, or your user may not understand how to buy crystals in the shop after all. The outcome is always the same — it leads to frustration, lower user engagement, lower essential metrics, and even product abandonment.
5. Stakeholder misalignment: Lo-fi prototypes serve as effective communication tools to align stakeholders’ expectations and vision. Skipping this step increases the likelihood of inconsistency among stakeholders such as designers, game designers, developers, artists, animators, and stakeholders. At any stage of your product development, it’s always faster and easier to discuss some actual prototype that a designer made in 15 minutes than it is to spend hours abstractly discussing an idea that exists in many different variations in your team’s minds. If you don’t forcibly synchronize your team through the lo-fi prototype and give them a vector for their thinking, you may have misunderstandings and conflicting interpretations of product requirements (which, let’s be honest, no one ever reads in total), leading to delays, rework, and lower overall product quality. Remember what happens to a dissatisfied user?
6. Missed design opportunities: Lo-fi prototyping empowers designers to explore and test different design ideas and concepts. You risk overlooking valuable design opportunities and innovative solutions by missing this stage. This omission can stifle creativity and result in a product lacking uniqueness and struggling to stand out in the marketplace. If you as a designer have not visually synchronized your ideas graphically with the art team, you may find yourself in a conversation where it’s revealed that “they got it all wrong,” and the supposed “lock” is, in fact, an object meant to secure a door, not a monumental 17th-century stone structure.
7. Increased risk: The refusal to use lo-fi prototyping increases the risk of developing a product that fails to achieve its intended goals. As a result, you will waste several hundred thousand dollars on a product that does not function properly instead of testing hypotheses in a much simpler way, saving both money and time. Missed market opportunities and dissatisfied users are just waiting to hand their money to competitors’ projects.

All of these problems can (and should) be avoided by taking a balanced approach to the product development process and integrating lo-fi prototyping as a fundamental component of development. In the end, this will only bring you closer to creating a more successful user-centered product.

In the second part of this article, discover how to work with both lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes in practice. You will also find 20 simple ideas on how to make your prototypes incredible. Stay tuned!