Awesome Pairs

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday, May 23, 2012 11:26:53 Aleix Pol wrote:
> Anyhow, please report us the issues you've discovered (either here or
> bko) and we'll manage to sort them out.

they are mostly design principles, so i'm not sure if they would work well 
into individual bug reports just yet. here are the things i noticed:

* it relies on mouse hover in certain places. for instance, to remove a player 
you need to hover the item and then hit the "X". this works really nicely with 
a mouse, but not with a touch screen where hover events just don't exist for 
practical reasons.

* animation timing. the animation that starts the layout of the board is 
reallllly slllloooooow. in practice, very few transition animations should be 
longer than .5s, and most should be more on the order of 1/4 to 1/3s. this 
gives the application a much nicer user experience. don't worry that people 
won't notice the wonderful animations if they are shorter.. our eyes are 
amazing. unfortunately our patience is short. :)

* hit areas should be bigger rather than smaller. on the game board, you have 
to touch the actual filled area of a piece. for pieces that are just outlines 
(such as in animal logic), this is hard even with a mouse. the hit area should 
be the entire space around the item to make it easily fingerable.

* scalable UI. the graphics must always fit inside the window. the "New game" 
button will at times appear outside the window if it is not big enough. on 
devices where it will run full screen at native resolution, there is no answer 
to this other than "fit everything in the window, or make it scrollable". in 
this case, making it fit in the window is probably prefered (the new game 
button could perhaps appear on the left outside the playing area, where it 
normally is during a game? still, with more than one player's scores being 
shown, you'll want to make the scoring area scrollable.)

* screen size may not be very big. this is the kind of game that should be 
playable on a phone, a tablet or a massive desktop. showing all the UI at 
once, with the left side, really takes away from the game play area. try it in 
an 800x480 window (Vivaldi's resolution) to see what it looks like. options 
include not showing the entire UI all at once (in Active apps, we often use a 
slide-in tray to hold things like "get themes" to keep them out of the way), 
making the game controls area on the left side use space more ergonomically to 
give more space to the play area ...

the above may seem like a lot ... but i really do think pairs is already in a 
pretty good state, it just needs that last 5% to make it sing and shine on 
touch devices :)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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