UX and Game Design: "Keep It Simple" Is Stupid.

Presentation, Content, and Structure

Often when designing a UI, I stumble across blogs and articles that discuss it and focus far too much on the structure. Wordpress is terribly guilty of this and I see it fairly often in the game industry.

In web design you might use flexbox for a content-centric design and not worry too much about the layout, or css grid if structure seems important. But the broader question is why? Why is structure important and why is it wrong to focus on structure over content?

First, structure *comes* from content. Even where over many years, we've taken certain kinds of content, be they the various genres of games, or the sundry type of websites or apps, we've learned to take all the various patterns and categorize them, to extract the commonly repeating idioms into what we call structure.

But if you're experienced, and a fan of UI design in general, then I bet you that you can name a number of counter-examples, those that broke the mould, or broke the 'rules' of good design and still somehow worked. And that follows *because* structure is derived from content. This is the same reason idioms, patterns, and best practices change over time, as we codify exceptions into their "own" rules, new best practices emerge which mostly everyone follows, and then yet more exceptions break them. And so it goes.

So we see content before structure. But isn't there something to be said of style? Why yes, there is.

To read the full article, all 14k words of it, head over to medium for more:

https://swcs.medium.com/ux-and-game...