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The 10 Default Serial Number User Interface Design Failures

On 05.17.10, In Design, My Rants, by GamingHorror

So you got this PC/Mac game and during install or when you’re first starting it, you’re asked to enter a Serial Number like WARZ-DOOD-IROK-4331. Errr….

I would like to indulge on the serial mistakes companies make when it comes to entering serial numbers and why this process, if done wrong, only helps to reinforce software pirates.

#1 – Serial Number is not trivial to locate. Either there is no mention whatsoever in the “Please enter your serial number” dialog where to find the Serial Number, or that information is wrong. It doesn’t happen very often but when it does, it’s a painful experience. There is no standard place where a serial number is printed but it’s very common to see them printed on the backside of the manual, at the bottom, or on one of the disks itself. Hopefully that disk isn’t in the drive while you’re asked to enter the serial number! Less frequent but very annoying are serial numbers printed on the inside of the cover pages, either the first or the last page, along with other text and not visually enhanced with a thick border, red color or something to that effect. One game i know hid the serial number on a label underneath one of the disks of the DVD box. This may actually be a good place if that disk is the first disk and the setup program asks you to enter the serial number right away.

#2 – Serial Number font makes it hard to differentiate certain characters. The game SpellForce i worked on suffered from this very unfortunate problem. Certain characters like 0 and O or 7 and 1 were so hard to differentiate, and printed in a font that was way too tiny and consisted of dots instead of lines (as if it was printed with a needle printer), that consistently users entered incorrect serial numbers. It was a customer support nightmare. A good serial number does not use look-alike characters and either print the zero with a slash inside or do not use either 0 or O in their serial numbers.

#3 – The Serial Number entry box is a simple textbox. Usually the serial number consists of dashes to seperate blocks of 3 to 5 characters. A simple textbox leaves it up to the user to enter the dashes and makes it hard to spot missing or extraneous characters in each block. Take a look at how Microsoft implemented the serial number entry boxes – each block of characters has it’s own box and the dashes are already printed between the boxes. The cursor advances to the next textbox when you filled in the exact amount of characters from the first box. This is the best way to ask users to enter a serial number and it should be standard with all other methods frowned upon and getting a 10% review score deduction if they don’t use it. Game companies, please learn this lesson!

#4 – Dashes are added automatically while entering the serial number. This is the poor man’s solution of Microsoft’s (and other’s) serial entry fields which uses several textboxes with the cursor advancing (see #3). In this case we have just one textbox but someone thought the user needn’t enter the dashes and so they are added while you are typing. It does help to get the number of characters per block right. However, the problem with automatically added dashes is that they’re not immediately visible and the user will type them anyway! Sometimes you’ll even end up with 2 dashes!

#5 – Dashes are not printed at all. In my opinion this and the following are the worst kind of mistakes. Your printed serial number contains dashes but while you enter it in the single textbox it does not allow you to type dashes. Some users may frantically try to type the dashes and get frustrated, they may even think their keyboard is broken. You’ll end up with a long chunk of non-seperated characters and it makes it very hard to spot any mistakes or missing characters. Game Developers: DON’T MAKE THIS MISTAKE!!!

#6 – Serial Number entry box is case sensitive. A serial number never contains lower-case characters. Any serial number entry box that prints the letters as they are typed, which is usually lowercase, is just downright dumb and stupid. I’ve seen it myself: users start entering the serial number, they notice that the letters are printed in lowercase, so they go back and delete them and then enter the characters with the SHIFT key held down. Of course this can lead to other mistakes, like holding the SHIFT key pressed while entering a digit. Major disaster! There is no excuse whatsoever not to automatically uppercase any letter entered in the textbox!

#7 – Serial Number has several entry boxes but cursor does not automatically advance. Someone tried to copy Microsoft’s system but forgot to implement the crucial element to advance the cursor to the next entry box once the correct amount of characters was entered in one. This is a user interface nuisance which simply need not exist. That is a 5-minute task anyone can implement even during a rush to get things done quickly (aka crunch).

#8 – Serial Number is entered using the game’s ornate font. This makes the characters not look at all like the ones that are printed and in some cases makes the characters hard to distinguish even if the serial number itself took care by not using characters like O and 0. Do not use ornate fonts for entering serial numbers, period.

#9 – The Serial Number contains upper and lowercase characters. Yes, seriously, WTF !?!?!?! Use a modern serial key generator service that adheres to certain usability standards. Serial Numbers with upper and lowercase characters should be outlawed.

#10 – The Serial Number entry boxes allow you to enter invalid characters. Developers already know which characters are allowed in the serial number and which aren’t, so why not filter them out? Do not allow the user to accidentally or incidentally type characters which can’t be part of the serial number, like any SHIFT+digit character if the users does happen to hold down shift while entering the key.

Let’s recap, a serial number should:

  • be all UPPERCASE
  • not use similar looking characters
  • be printed in a standard location (back of manual)
  • be printed in a readable and reasonably large font
  • be visually highlighted from surrounding text or images to make it easy to spot
  • not be printed on the disk if it may be in the drive when the user is asked for the serial number
  • not be printed under the disk in the DVD case if the user is asked for the serial number before having had to remove the disk during install

The User Interface Guidelines for entering Serial numbers are:

  • one textbox for each chunk of characters with dashes already drawn between boxes
  • cursor advancing to next textbox when exact number of characters has been entered
  • entered characters are automatically and properly uppercased
  • invalid characters are not allowed to be entered
  • uses a font that closely matches the printed font / does not use an ornate font

It’s really rather simple, so why do i have to see these mistakes repeated over and over again???

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What are you getting, Mr. Game Developer?

On 03.04.10, In Business & Industry, by GamingHorror

This question has been answered in the Salary Survey from Develop. Note that the currency is GBP, British Pounds. The Game Developer magazine offers a comparative survey for the US but keep in mind that it’s from last year.

Develop’s article has some interesting graphs, and the one that struck out to me is the one that clearly shows the Top 3 reasons for game developers to change jobs:

The Top 3 Reasons for changing jobs are:

  1. Looking for a new challenge
  2. Salary increase
  3. Limited opportunities for growth at current company

Indeed, those would have easily been my picks. I certainly have switched companies once for number 3 closely followed by number 1 while actually earning less (number 2). Now that i have left my last full-time employment, i can say that it was again – by far – number 3 followed by number 1 with number 2 not being a real issue – again.

Yes, overall game developers don’t earn as much as the database system engineers at SAP do. Or the Citrix consultants for steam-powered robots. Or what have you – yup, i’ve actually registered once for a freelancer job site that lists all those weird jobs that sound totally fricking, err, boring but also sound like they make a ton of money from that (why else would you want to do such a job, ey?).

Money isn’t really the issue. If you can grow in your company (and it doesn’t even have to mean making a career) and the challenges are satisfying while pushing your boundaries and learning new skills without neither feeling lost in a sea of technology mumbo-jumbo or getting bored and frustrated by assembly-line work with broken tools – if that all works out for you, you’re better off in the game industry!

Ok, that is, unless you have to crunch.
Note: the above link searches my blog for “crunch” – if this post just re-appears simply scroll down…

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Can too much production kill your productivity?

On 02.23.10, In My Experience, My Rants, by GamingHorror
Note: for some reason, this post was stuck as a draft since April 2009 – just to put this into better perspective, i was still working at EA Phenomic at the time.

Yes, it can. My humble opinion. No, actually, this is my conviction.

I’m not talking about crunch time. About taking on too much work so that everyone has to work overtime. I am talking about planning for (or having to plan for, or simply doing) too much production in order to get all the work done in time, so that most everything else falls by the wayside.

This is my experience which i’ve had confirmed today during an interesting conversation at work. With “experience” i mean that if you work at a larger company you can – depending on the work you do – easily dig into your own line of work and forget everything around you. That isn’t something that gets planned but it’s easy to fall into this mode if everyone around you is swarming around like a busy bee-hive and you just want to get your own damned work done. But, it’s crucial to regularly lift up your head and ask what’s going on. If, company-wide, no such time is planned in and certainly no one cares to stop and look around, watching, listening, mentoring, let alone “leadershipping” then that’s the model most people will follow, eventually. That or busting their heads together. Busy worker bees.

Or so it seems.

What it doesn’t say is that people aren’t bees. They have needs for communication, for understanding and learning. People want to get feedback, they want to participate, they want to be asked and decide for themselves. However, working in a Bee hive accomplishes only work. Communication – and that is my experience – falls completely by the wayside except for the one focused on the work at hand. Some may glee over this perceived efficiency. But i can tell you – it is not an experience that creates happyiness ever-after. The counterweight that communication whole is that all the good ideas, the criticism and desires are shared like outbursts, at the wrong time, with the wrong people, or both. There’s only two options: eat it, or die.

It’s a slow process. Something like that frog put into cold water and heating it until it boils. He won’t jump out – only if the water was hot from the start. What happens is that unless you are fortunate enough to be able to work (mostly) in isolation on isolated parts of the game on your own accord, you are drained into this whole hive of swarming bees. Everyone wants a part of me, it seems. Since everyone is so busy, communication is focused on the essential. Like robots. Only that feelings still get hurt.

It gets worse if the communication fails to instill ownership or a time frame. You can be certain that phrases like “We’ll talk about it this week.” will be the last thing you’ve heard about this topic for the week. Responsibility goes down the drain – unless you have to be responsible. It’s simple and effective – being bombarded with work can make you …. work. Work hard. So hard, in fact, that communicating, cooperating, getting an agreement with other people seems like a drag you want to avoid. As much as possible. Just like everything else that isn’t directly beneficial to your work. Helping others, especially mentoring or training. Offering opportunities for growth and learning. Career planning. And so on.

As a side note: even the busiest bee-hive couldn’t survive for long if the bees would stop their intricate communication dances. With a company, you’ll know that something’s up when the communication still happens but goes sour very quickly, and there’s a lot of talking behind closed doors, respectively awkward silence when you enter a room.

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History repeats itself – the game industry’s “spouse” letters

On 02.08.10, In Business & Industry, by GamingHorror

I would like to start the week by referring to a couple dramatic articles about the worst side of the game industry. The kind of stories that actually force companies to back down and turn around how work is done. As far as i know, things have changed for the better for EA. If the same is going to happen with Rockstar is still out in the open, first reports tell no immediate positive effect other than the promise of an extended time-off after production.

Back in the days when EA spouse was a hot topic it was quickly followed by the even more interesting report of events by Joe Straitiff as he experienced them while working for EA. Since then, it is said that EA has made major concessions and leaps forward to secure employees are treated fairly and crunch times are very limited. I can not really confirm or deny this, since i’ve been working in an EA studio that was bought in 2006. It was promised to us that we’ll continue working as we’ve always done. However things did change of course, there’s no way a big corporate entity who bought a small development shop is not going to have no or just a little effect on the team and how it’s working. Some things changed for the better, for example we finally got air conditioning, upped our server farm, hired a full-time system administrator and got access to a huge knowledge base and useful tools. Others changed for the worse, for example i’ve already mentioned how much i hated the employee rating system. It felt way too corporate and formal for our tastes. Overall i can just confirm what everyone who has ever worked for a big company already knows: how you feel about your work and how your work / life balance turns out to be like is highly dependent on the studio or department you work in, and of course the team and how they work together (or not).

A month after the EA spouse letter, Noel Llopis wrote his 2-part article “All work and no play makes Jack a dull game developer” which is by far the best summary of issues, myths and recommendations anyone has ever written on the subject. Make sure you read both part one and part two. I do, however, disagree with him that sleep deprivation might actually help for design and art, as they “have some of that touchy-feely creative mystique” as he puts it. It does not hold true as it is not creative art or design that is forged but often art is developed with certain technical and gameplay constraints, tools need to be used efficiently and numbers juggled. The same goes for designers who regularly juggle with numbers, navigate excel sheets of varying complexity, and always have to keep side-effects in mind with whatever they’re planning to do. So it’s not typically a touchy-feely kind of work that you perform as artist or designer and is subject to the same issues a programmer feels. Besides, even programmers have and need those intuitive, creative moments so they’re not all number crunchers and byte eaters either.

These issues were unfortunately debated again just recently, as Rockstar spouses made similar accusations about the working conditions at Red Dead Redemption developer Rockstar San Diego. The article itself was terribly written and received numerous bashings because of it. And i would say mostly because people feel it’s such a big issue and worry that the terrible writing could have a detrimental effect on the cause. If you read the Gamasutra article, don’t forget to concentrate on the comments. It currently ends with a statement from self-proclaimed Rockstar San Diego programmer Code Monkey after Rockstar apparently has promised employees an extended time-off after production is completed. He says:

“My apologies go to Rockstar for not anticipating that anything I said here could possibly have a negative impact of some kind.”

I can’t shake the feeling that that’s not the end of the story.

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Crunch Time = Producer Failure

On 01.17.10, In My Experience, by GamingHorror

On a related note to my last post: crunch time = producer failure. This is from Mac Senour who should know.

But i would add that it’s not just a simple issue of planning, it’s one of communicating “can do” and “won’t do” to the proper channels and not caving in. In some cases it may not even be possible if the executives think they know better, or are simply forced to pass on what even higher-up executives want. Which is why it’s probably easier to crunch in a smaller shop because you know you yourself and your colleagues are mostly to blame. At least it’ll be better for team morale.

Honestly, i can’t remember i’ve seen that happen but there’s a lot a Producer/Project Manager can do to shield the team from that outside influence. Since you’re always working for someone else who’s the one putting the pressure on you, at the end of the day, it’s the job of the person communicating with that someone to avoid crunch and not being afraid to renegotiate contracts if need be and obviously keeping the worst harm from the team. But sometimes that may be next to impossible depending on the contractor. After all, you signed up for it, why change the contract now? It would not only lower your standing with the contractor, it would be admitting defeat. Few people/teams would be willing to do that.

Personally i believe this is about the most crucial part of game development but also the hardest. Few game developers and publishers have realistic expectations and even if you’re approaching the project plan conservatively, chances are the team will know it and adjust accordingly by thinking there’s still plenty of room to add this or that – then just going ahead doing this or that and opening Pandora’s box that you’re trying so hard to keep closed.

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