The instructions would be better if they read “the five photos were taken at different times, but were all taken within a few hundred feet of each other”.
> Each day, a random location is generated, along with five photos within five miles.
So the pictures are all within 53,000 feet of each other (10 miles). Note that the random location is just some point, and probably not in a town or city.
I guess it's because that information is dropped at the wrong time, because right after that you first have to spend time on figuring out how the weird UI works so you can actually make your guess. Why does the map have to be hidden behind a button, and why does it have to cover the picture? There is so much wasted space on the screen, why not use it to show both at the same time?
One of the most effective ways I have found to work is having windows open on the same monitor next to each other in a vertical tiling - almost as if they were two physical documents.
Was it great? No. But I also didn't have to spend any time figuring anything put.
Context matters the most.
From my experience, most people don't read the instructions or text notes anyway. So its possible that an even better UX is one where the user figures out what they can do through intuition rather than reading.
This fascinated me ~90s computer gaming. There were clear camps of "people who always read the manual" and "people who never never read the manual."
I think I was the only one who really cared about it. I've had it for months, I think. Read it cover to cover more times than I could count. Pretty much memorized every bit of lore and trivia there was in it - and there was quite a lot. The manual itself was a small booklet, with a couple pages of backstory for each of the playable species, plus a lot of extra world-building details about individual units, buildings and planets. So even as I didn't have access to the game, my own imagination built a whole world and infinite stories out of what some would consider "filler content". But this filler content made me care, and eventually shell out my pocket money for Brood War, and later on, money from my first full-time job on the collector's edition of StarCraft II.
That SC manual came probably at the tail end of the era where the publishers put any kind of effort into manuals. Case in point: SC:BW came with just a tiny booklet with about equal split between lore/context, instructions for the new and changed game aspects, and legal/credits. SC II came... well, I don't know with, by that time Blizzard stopped caring about the game story anyway.
(Oh, and speaking of warm memories of computer manuals in the 90s, I have a special place in my heart for the big, heavy, couple hundred pages long manual to Word 6.0 (not 100% sure about the exact version), and earlier, for the interactive self-training application that came included with Windows 3.11 - that one taught me how to use the mouse!)
More interesting in retrospect, the first manual contained extensive descriptions of kiith clans. They go on for dozens of pages, and don't show up in the game at all. Someone spent serious effort writing them. Why? Left over from an earlier version of the game pitch where the player would have to manage relations between competing groups on the mothership? https://sierrachest.com/gfx/games/Homeworld/box/manual.pdf
Skimming from the dozens of pages I would love to have read back then, I think this may be the case of writers creating a detailed setting for the game early on - only fraction of it could become part of the gameplay, but presumably designers and writers were using it as a reference. And, come release time, it didn't hurt to include the world-building bits - it might just get some players to enjoy the game more (I know it would've had this effect on me), while the alternative, back then, was for those details to never see the light of day.
And/or maybe they hoped to make some follow-up games, or tie-in novels, etc. - then including those details was both important to solidify the fictional universe, and would drive some secondary sales for the game itself.
Some board games come with pretty hefty manuals, still. Twilight Imperium comes with a whole separate lore booklet that has nothing to do with playing the game.
Pretty interesting idea that eschewed technological tricks to prevent copying.
Which specific version do you distinctly remember?
Especially common are the people who get others to read the manual for them and answer all their questions, because they themselves obviously have no time to be reading them but more than enough time to grab some unfortunate sod to do so.
And about the instructions. Sure, it is useful to read them, but even more useful, for all humans, is to rely on the training. We don't carry around dictionaries to talk, we don't read "Introduction to Javascript" daily, we don't use UX designer guideline book to open a faucet in the bathroom. And re-training is not free, that's why so many people jumped in based on their old skill. Not based on their ignorance, but on the skill, and that's important distinction. People actually knew how to play such games, that's why they subconsciously omitted instructions.
Not in tradle, for example
This happens in my life constantly when dealing with family IT problems or mentoring juniors at work (and sometimes working with seniors too!). People just do not read the output of their computers.
If you can constantly guarantee that everything work the same all the time, then there are fewer issues. However, it does not, and because computers are prone to both bugs and marketing gimmicks, it is easy to burn out on a mental model of things.
People who do read the output of their computers experiencing situations where the computer doesn't do what it says it does, can quickly burn out. Not to mention, reading only what the computer says is a good way to diagnose the wrong thing. You observe something similar when a feature or bug is exposed and the first response is "well it used to work before" - which is often (partially) true, but that does nothing to explain why it doesn't work or did work.
Then there is social and linguistic familiarty (often iconographic). It's telling that the way the IQ test is most flawed is that it scores those with more cultural familiarity higher - things that seem "easy" may only be so because of a certain familiarity, with where things are commonly placed, common functionality, etc.
And again, as UX designers destroy these foundations in the hopes of making their UIs "easier", it only makes things more difficult, not less, to understand.
Unfortunately, that sucks even more from a UX design perspective, since it means even if you absolutely nail the instructions you need to know all of the surrounding context and find a way to address it.
This game reminds me very much of chronophoto (https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html), which prompts with photos from different years, and so I was expecting it to work more like that.
> ~500,000 geo-tagged images from Wikimedia Commons. Each day, a random location is generated, along with five photos within five miles.
In a remote area, there will likely only be a few notable landmarks nearby so you can expect to see many pictures of a single landmark. This might be why people think the pictures are supposed to of the same place.
I expected to be able to look at all five photos and make one guess.
With five guesses, it’s easy to triangulate a position.
It was communicated in the very first sentence of the instructions. It's just that both you and me failed to read the instructions. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
“Morally”, no we don’t. (Me included.)
Say, if you are a games designer and want to get the message across, then you can start A/B testing ways to get your point (pun mostly not intended) across more effectively.
That is, the more stuff is usable without reading manuals, the more people ignore the manuals - making it harder to build complex, powerful tools, and in fact creating a strong design pressure to "fisher price" your product. Overall, this trend ends up disempowering users.
If folk aren't seeing the text laid out in front of them, there are a couple tricks - demonstrate, make the instructions pictographic/difficult to dismiss.
There is a fine line between making your game accessible and providing too much instruction, but I can think of a couple visual cues that probably could have been given.
That being said I had no problem reading the intro, on the other hand I will regularly finish those long, long, long 45 minute articles that have "congratulations you made it to the bottom", and I know generally people who are great at reading much, much faster than me have little problem figuring out "techy" things, so I do think in general people just don't read enough.
By the time you actual visit the site you ALREADY have an idea of what it's supposed to be about, the colors draw your eyes to "Here's how you can tell your score, press here to start" and skip the fine print entirely. People MIGHT skim the "fine print" that is the actual instructions with key details, and what do you read when you skim? The first part of a paragraph/sentence to establish a subject and action. And what's the First part of that sentence? The same thing the title of this post told you.
"Oh, yeah, I already know this"
Skip to the pretty colors telling you how to score your guess and start the game.
EDIT: Also, the UI after you click through to start also assumes the user read the instructions, instead of trying to organically guide them to the same conclusions. /EDIT.
Cue so many people wondering how they could miss something laid out so clearly in front of them.
People just aren’t good with words and will come up with all sorts of reasons they didn’t see it.
That’s not to say I’m any better, just that I get to see all the requests and excuses. Bolder, bigger, alerts, doesn’t matter.
The game is great, but I'm shouting to the wind about the decline in quality of online maps. For example, I can barely see roads on Google maps any more. The lines are faint and low contrast. Zooming in doesn't help because the font remains tiny. Map makers hate middle-aged people.
You would be amazed how many users miss key information presented to them. You’d think you can plan and predict, but they always manage to find a new and surprising way to just not get stuff.
UX testing on simplest grittiest prototypes yields the best results in my experience. The more work you put into it before showing it to users, the more irritated you will be.
One more arrow in the quiver of "users don't read"
Maybe if I hadn't played things like Geoguesser and was expecting it to work the same way, I would have read it a bit more carefully.
Many people, myself included, say they had no idea at first that the photos were all meant to be from the same location, even though the very first sentence of the instructions was "There are five photos from the same place."
I'm pretty sure I read the instructions, I guess that just didn't register? An opportunity to reflect on how hard it can be to properly communicate with users, I guess.