Game Designers Hold the Secret to Perfect AI Interfaces

AI agentic systems are revolutionizing how innovation teams create digital products, heralding a new era in the future of work. As these systems become increasingly sophisticated, it's crucial to provide users with a clear and comprehensive onboarding experience, especially when introducing new capabilities. Tutorial patterns found in popular open-world titles like Grand Theft Auto offer valuable insights for teaching users how to effectively navigate and utilize next-generation AI agentic systems.

Why Game Design Principles? 

Game design principles are particularly well-suited for agentic AI user experiences because they emphasize creating engaging, intuitive, and empowering interactions. Just as game designers craft immersive worlds that draw players in and keep them motivated, we can apply these principles to shape AI interfaces that feel natural and empowering for users.

While agentic AI systems are powerful automation tools, they are susceptible to hallucinations, inaccuracies, and errors. Defining clear instructions, roles, and capabilities for these agents is crucial to ensure reliable and effective collaboration with humans. This is where game design principles come into play. Games provide clear instructions while AI experiences lack clear explanations of their capabilities and limitations.

The open-world nature of games also mirrors the flexible, autonomous nature of agentic AI, where users need guidance to navigate the vast possibilities. In games, great onboarding processes are indistinguishable from the actual product. ² Providing little nudges at just the right moment, such as offering tips when gamers struggle or introducing new missions when they're ready, is designed to keep gamers in their flow state of enjoyment.

Onboarding Lessons from MMOGs

In Grand Theft Auto (GTA)⁶ , the player is introduced to Lamar Davis, who provides the in-game tutorials and manages missions by helping aspiring criminals (in the game) build their career. He guides the player through the game's basic mechanics of races, shopping, hijacking, and robberies, and a quick guide on missions. His role isn’t a simple tutorial, but a holistic role helping players progress by building their crime career. A hallmark of MMOG first time user experiences is they are highly interactive, allow for choice and flow throughout the game. Players are not shepherded down a single narrow path.

These first-time user experiences are not isolated one-and-done tutorials, but rather holistically integrated into the software as a core feature. This approach aims to keep players informed and at peak performance throughout their gaming session, continuously supporting their learning and engagement.

Onboarding experiences are broken down into three phases:

1. Starting slow - the initial first-time user experience principles.

2. Keeping motivated in the messy middle - focuses on keeping users on-track and coming back to accomplish their goals.

3. Pushing to finish strong - details incentivizing users to not give up in key moments of struggle common near completion of tasks.

1. Starting Slow Building Confidence

These are the principles that help users learn controls, the capabilities and goal of the game and other details to help onboard as first time users. 

• Keep it simple - Creating goals drives usage, inspiring users to want to clear their task-list in the game. Too much can overwhelm users, making it important to only give them one task at a time.

• Progressive disclosure of game mechanics - Allow a user to focus on practicing one skill at a time, only introducing a new skill once the user feels confident.

• Give users a head start - help them get a little win, so they are more likely to accomplish their goals.

2. Keeping Motivated In The Messy Middle

Onboarding is not constrained to the first session of the game or application, users can be nudged and motivated when they get stuck or frustrated. These principles focus on continually educating the user about the capabilities or missions within a game or app and motivate them to continue.

• Celebrate completed tasks - as users accomplish key milestones celebrate these wins with moments of delight. Just as with work tasks, in open-world games users could get distracted and leave so celebrating completed tasks and conveying progress helps keep them on-track.

• Difficulty increases over time - arrange tasks in a manner that they are easy at first and progressively become more challenging. This arrangement will help users get into a flow-state and not be discouraged if they have difficulty along the journey.

• Showing progress - show the users how far they’ve come in a journey with visual cues such as progress bars and completed task lists where they have earned points helps keep them motivated to continue exploring the game's tasks.

• Motivational messages - keep users motivated by giving them a brief update of their progress. This could include an in-app message or notification to return to complete the next task.

3. Pushing To Finish Strong

Bringing players or users back to complete next steps like a new level or mission can be challenging, but by combining these principles helps incentivize users to come back and start a new gaming session. 

• The Zeigarnik Effect - people tend to remember unfinished tasks much more than completed tasks. As users complete tasks, new tasks are presented to them about what comes next in the app.⁷

• In-game incentives - tasks are worth points that contribute to a score. Points may be used to purchase rewards like weapons, vehicles or outfits that help win the game.

• Low stakes - the last and most important hallmark of a good first time user experience in a game is that there is no pressure surrounding the tasks and are easy to try again to get a few repetitions to master a new skill. 

AI Applications Embracing Game Design Principles

Some AI experiences have already started to adopt some of these principles, demonstrating more engaging and effective user onboarding experiences. As these applications mature we will see more applications design more holistic onboarding and user retention experiences using the breadth of the principles we’ve outlined.

Google Image FX

• Embraces the "head start" principle in its user onboarding. 

• The app uses a mad lib-style dropdown system that allows users to choose from smart default words, providing good guidance for creating imagery. This approach encourages users to experiment with different options, knowing they can easily change their choices or start over without consequences. 

• Users can quickly cycle through options, seeing how different combinations affect the generated image. 

• This low-stakes approach gives users a head start on understanding the composition of a good image prompt, creating a safe environment that promotes experimentation and learning.

Perplexity

• Utilizes the "progressive disclosure of mechanics" principle to allow users to discover new skills and topics. 

• The app's Discovery tab introduces users to news stories that may be of interest, and when a user chooses one, they can ask follow-up questions. 

• The agent then researches additional related topics, bringing new sources and details into the story. 

• This discovery of a new interesting topic allows users to learn about the capabilities of Perplexity's experience and explore new areas of interest. 

• The benefit of choosing from a news story is the low stakes - users are following leisure curiosity, not an important research task at work.

FigJam by Figma

• Provides a "progressive disclosure" to help users start with a basic prompt or template, and then the system offers small nudges to guide the user in iterating and refining their boards.

• For example, when creating a board to document and synthesize user research, the user can start with a simple prompt. 

• The system will then iteratively provide new versions that build upon the old, revealing more advanced features and AI-powered assistance as the user progresses through their workflow. 

• This gradual unveiling of capabilities helps users discover and leverage the app's increasingly sophisticated tools.

These examples represent early steps in creating AI-driven experiences that feel intuitive and engaging, keeping humans involved in shaping creative deliverables. But this is just the beginning.

Teamwork makes the dream work

Our mission must be to build AI systems that are not just powerful, but also accessible, motivating, and aligned with human creativity. By weaving game design principles into AI user experiences, we can craft interfaces that empower users to collaborate seamlessly with their AI agents as true partners in innovation.

The future of work demands that humans and AI work in harmony, each leveraging their unique strengths to push the boundaries of what's possible. Let's create a world where AI augments our abilities, amplifies our creativity, and enables us to achieve more together than we ever could alone. Through thoughtful, human-centric design, we can unlock the full potential of Agentic AI and usher in a new era of collaborative innovation.

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1   Leitner, H., & Fletcher, S. (2024, July 15). What is agentic AI & is it the next big thing? SSO Network.

2  Cheng, J. (2022, January 31). Using video games to learn about product onboarding. UX Collective.

3  Google AI Test Kitchen. (2024). Image FX.

4  Perplexity AI. (2023). Discover.

5  Figma. (2021). Figjam AI.

6  Rockstar Games. (2013). Grand Theft Auto V.

7  McLeod, S. (2020, October 26). Zeigarnik and von Restorff: The memory effects and the stories behind them. PubMed.