Design sharing of popular DJ simulator Electronauts: ease of use, hierarchy and flexibility

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(XR Navigation Network March 19, 2024Electronauts is a popular DJ simulator that allows you to be the king of the crowded music festivals and bring passion and joy to everyone.

Below, we explore the interface design of Electronauts to see what makes it so great.

Electronauts is a music production game developed by Survivor. Even if you don't have much musical talent like me, you can turn into a DJ with said production.

While it's easy to assume that the game's interface has little relevance beyond the music, this is not the case. The core design of Electronauts' interface is very clever.

This interface has three pillars: ease of use, hierarchy and flexibility.

usability

It's clear why designers would provide players with drumsticks in games with drum instruments, but the really smart thing to do would be to use drumsticks as a tool to manipulate the interface. Humans have evolved to be very good at using tools. In fact, research shows that with enough practice, we subconsciously and proprioceptively see tools as extensions of ourselves.

In the case of Electronauts, for example, the additional ontological extensions provided by the drumsticks allow the interface to be comfortably large, thus helping to overcome accuracy issues and making the whole interface easier to use with less chance of error.

We can see this clearly in the way the game's buttons work. While the intuitive idea is to press the button when you touch it, Electronauts does things differently for the sake of precision and reliability. Instead of simply touching the button to activate it, you actually need to insert your drumstick into the button and pull the trigger.

This is a very clever solution to the lack of physical feedback in VR. Real-life buttons are designed around physical feedback depth, and that feedback helps you press them reliably. Because there's little feedback to push against the drumsticks in VR, it's hard to confidently aim and activate physically simulated buttons.

Requiring users to intersect the button with their drumsticks and then pull the trigger to confirm their choice greatly improves the accuracy of the game's buttons.

hierarchical

Hierarchy is a fundamental component of any interface. It is the way you organize the functionality of an interface so that it is logical, easy to remember, and easy to access.

Electronauts has a very clever hierarchy whereby all the game's features are contained in tools, and all the tools are presented as cubes. To access the functionality of any tool, you simply place the cube on top of the abutment.

You can think of each cube as its own little app, much like smartphone apps are displayed as icons, each containing specific functions. That way it's easy to remember where to access what functions without overwhelming the user by showing them all at once.

Since only three cubes can be active at a time, Electronauts? does a good job of creating a hierarchy that is organized clearly and unambiguously. If the hierarchy is too deep, like folders within folders within folders, it can mean spending too much time digging through the features you're looking for, even if it means everything is very clearly organized.

dexterity

The hierarchical design in Electronauts provides flexibility at the same time. Using the tools included in the physical multidimensional dataset, users are free to manipulate them in whatever way is most useful for their particular needs. This simultaneously makes the interface inherently dual-flexible. For example, I can easily switch the Backing Tracks tool to the left side instead of hard-coding it to the right, which is better for me because I'm left-handed.

Being able to quickly and easily arrange the interface in a way that best suits you is like being able to drag and drop windows around your computer. In a music production environment, being able to quickly and easily adjust the workspace for a given task makes the interface more useful than hard-coding it into a single arrangement.

summarize

One test of a great interface is whether it can be applied quickly and accurately and doesn't get in the way of the user. Electronauts clearly demonstrates this, as it allows the user to smoothly control a large number of variables, even when prodded by the rhythms of different songs.

The lesson I really want people to take away from this is that the principles of ease of use, hierarchy and flexibility apply to any VR user interface, not just music games. The core design concepts of the Electronauts interface can be applied to many other VR experiences, even to the extent of using drumsticks or some sort of handheld tool as the primary means of interface interaction.