User experience problems – Factory Balls Review

I’m tempted to rate this game only one star but the core concept of the game is good enough that I can see past my UX frustration. It takes almost 20 seconds to load the game (To get to the point where you were actually playing) every time you play it. Several unnecessary touches/clicks, animations and other worthless-at-best fluff between you and the action. Contrary to the developer’s response, this almost-20-second wait happens WHEN you touch the fast forward icon. (The wait is even longer when you don’t.) 1. Touch the app icon to start the app. Wait several seconds. 2. Touch fast forward icon. Wait a couple seconds for unnecessary animation. 3. Press play icon. Wait for more unnecessary animation. 4. Press letter icon. Wait for more unnecessary animation. 5. Press number icon. Wait for even more unnecessary animation. … How about a continue button when you start the app to just play the next level? Or make a Settings toggle to turn all of that time wasting animation off. But more importantly, why does the app need so many steps (and lengthy animations) to get to the point where one plays a game. It’s not normal. It’s not good. Furthermore several of these unnecessary steps appear again every time you want to navigate menus. The crux of the game is to duplicate an example ball but the example ball is far smaller than it needs to be. The box in which it comes is larger than the ball itself. On small screens it’s sometimes hard to figure out what’s on the bottom of the ball. Though on one hand it makes sense that you can’t put the belt over the hat for example, it’s neither clever nor cute that we have to both put elements on and take them off in the “correct“ order. This adds nothing to the game experience nor does it affect the difficulty. It’s just annoying. Developers response clued me in to the notion of tapping on the ball to remove items, but this wasn’t intuitive to me. If you don’t value your time, user experience, and you think several easy-to-fix, needling elements won’t bother you, this game is closer to four stars than the 1.5 I give it. Even more frustrating because after looking at other apps by this developer (like the Halloween version of this game, his game “yellow“) some of these UX-killing ‘features’ aren’t there. Dear developer, If you fix these things or even most of them I will absolutely crank up the stars and edit this review. I think you’ll find that improving UX will improve your sales.
Review by Uncoolcentral on Factory Balls.