What Games Teach Us About UX: Design for Learning, Not Just Features

Scott Jenson argues that video games are a richer model for interface design than most apps, because games are engineered around how people learn and progress rather than around a checklist of features. His core complaint is that typical apps dump unrelated capabilities into one product and leave users to invent their own confusing mental model of how it all fits together, whereas good games deliberately shape a coherent arc from first launch to mastery.

He frames the lessons through six ideas. Users always construct their own narrative, so experiences should be connected rather than a grab-bag of functions. Games are ‘fractal,’ breaking every action into nested layers of skill, and they treat fun as a synonym for learning by introducing one core mechanic and then teaching endless variations of it (his example is the way Super Mario turns a single jump into many). Games also lean on rich affordances — layered visual, audio, and haptic feedback plus small atmospheric ‘grace notes’ that teach without instructing — and on ‘hintiness,’ nudging players forward subtly instead of interrupting them with dialogs. Finally, pacing matters: games open with a single simple action and add complexity gradually, while apps overwhelm newcomers up front and drive them to skip onboarding entirely.

The practical takeaway for product teams is to build and refine a core interaction before piling on features, to layer learning progressively, and to favor quiet, repeated hints over explicit prompts. The significance is less about copying game aesthetics and more about borrowing games’ discipline in designing for user competence over time — a useful corrective for teams that measure success by feature count.