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Respecting Time on a Loading Screen
Whether it’s waiting for a web page or that next Netflix video, we’ve all had to annoyingly wait for that endless spinning wheel at one point or another. While realistically, we probably shouldn’t expect to watch a high quality video on youtube without some form of loading anytime soon, shouldn’t there a way to make the experience better? If users need to spend their time waiting for loading, why aren’t we making better use of that time?
This is something games do quite well. Due to the heavy graphics component of many video games, it’s almost impossible to create one without creating heavy, friction-filled loading screens. But what’s interesting is how each of them handles that process to remove friction. They’ve found ways to distract the player with eye-catching animations, deliver key information for players to think about, and upsell particular behaviors players otherwise may not discover. I’ll introduce the approaches two well known games take to this problem and describe how the same lessons can be applied to consumer products, examining smart home devices as an example.
Let’s start with Mario. While it lacks a conventional loading screen, its title screen served as almost the same purpose. When a player was idle on that screen, a demo of the first level would play. There you could see Mario, your character, moving to the right while collecting points and power-ups. Beyond being some of the best technology to watch (in that time!), it helped introduce the user interface, the concept of “points” and visually showed different power-ups like the mushroom and the fire flower. By the time the player actually hit start, they would already know the basics of the game, reducing the friction and the steepness of the learning curve. The same is true for many modern games.
Similar to Mario, League of Legend’s loading screen conveys all the necessary information for players…
