A couple days ago I opened a new board game I got as a present for Christmas, to play with some friends. It looked very promising, so we took all the pieces out of the box and I started going through the instructions.

As I was reading, a paragraph mentioned a difference between a 2-player game and a 3+-player game, which I thought would be the only difference (in many games you just deal a different number of cards, or you remove some special cards, and so on). The problem is that the following sections all assumed a 3+-player game, but it was never clear until the very end, when a clearly-marked paragraph stated how each of the preceding sections would be different in a 2-player game. This was frustrating, because it meant I had to read the whole manual before being able to play correctly.

This is not good design, and it's true for game instructions as well as technical docs.

#docs #UX