Clutter prevents teaching

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

To those who don’t know, I run an online community called Crysandrea. In Crysandrea, we have a pretty cool game so users can play when the forums are lonely. While designing the game, I decided to explain to the users how to play the forest, so I built a tour they would be redirected to when they play the game for the first time.

The current tour page looks like this:

Current Crysandrea tour layout.

The idea is nice, but how many users will really read all of that? When I was designing it this seemed like a good idea. I’m giving plenty of information for everyone to understand the game as much as possible, but as it turns out, only around 3% of our users actually read the entire thing.

After realizing I was designing a business-like document, I declared: “This must be re-aligned to be scan-friendly“. After spending 10 minutes drawing some simple wireframes, I was quite happy with this little kindergarten-like sketch.

Crysandrea Wireframe

Once I release the new design, I’ll be sure to post and explain why the page is designed the way it was.