This just got passed around the office: a UX design analysis of Angry Birds, touching on mental models of mechanics, feedback response times, short-term memory management, the importance of mystery (almost exactly equivalent to what I called “delight” in my book), the audio design, and the visuals and branding.

It’s like a little master-class wrapped up into a blog post, and a potent reminder that designers in other fields are perfectly capable of doing much of what we do — indeed, are often more expert in some areas. It behooves game designers to go learn the lessons outsiders can teach us.

In most commercial software interfaces, response time management is completely overlooked even by those who claim to be UI design experts. The developers of Angry Birds managed response time in a way that goes far beyond simply “faster is better”.

For example, in Angry Birds, it was possible for the programmers to have made the flight of the birds fast – very fast, but they didn’t. Instead they programmed the flight of the angry flock to be leisure pace as they arc across the sky heading for the pigs’ glass houses. This slowed response time, combined with a carefully crafted trajectory trace (the flight path of the bird), solves one huge problem for all user interfaces – error correction. The vast majority of software user interfaces have no consideration for how users can be taught by experience with the system to improve their performance. This problem is a vast and complex issue for screen-based trading systems where error correction is not only essential, but also career threatening.

via Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience.