After having stopped playing Hearthstone for a while i decided to go back to it on mobile.
I experienced some annoyance with its menus.
First things i saw when i finally updated the app and was ready to play are the new quests.
Now, they are pretty visible and you can't decide to not see them everytime you log in but some aspects of it are not amazing.
First, the quests appear just after the loading screen. The problem is that everytime the loading screen ends and the quests appear the screen darkens and reading the quests becomes very hard.
At first i thought i could just tap once to brighten the screen without getting rid of the quests but that never worked. A simple tap would always remove the quests.
It is a detail since you can always see your quests again in your quest log but it can be frustrating. An extra click could be required to skip the quests and therefore resolve this problem.
Second, the other problem i faced for a loooong time was that i had a quest i could just not understand and therefore finish because there was nothing to explain it. I even tried to google it on google but i seemed to not find any respond (in french and in english).
Also because the english name was kill 10 monsters with "the tracker". Having googled it i could only find deck trackers online and nothing to help me solve this.
I then later discovered that it is a quest related to a single mode adventure called the monster hunt. Now, it's true i had stopped playing it for a long time and had no idea of the expansions they had added to the game but i didn't even know it existed and it was free.
For such a specific quest, The problem could have been solved by giving the option to receive extra information about the quest (how to accomplish it, to find it etc...)
Third, when you click on an adventure something an animation starts and shows something like the image above. What it does is that it prevents you from using the back button and you are only allowed to click on enter. It can be frustrating because if you accidentally click on the wrong adventure mode you get this screen and you can't go back. You have to move forward and you get more animation before you can finally go back. The clickstream works like a funnel that doesn't provide error prevention and recovery.
Same thing goes for the next image below, you get a pop up text when you click on "normal"
If you then realize it is not the mode or adventure you want to select you have no way to click on the back button or skip the pop up message. You have to wait till the animation is over.
Mobile games are often played for shorter amount of time than other consoles and require to be very smooth and quick to respond to player's needs and motivations, especially with F2P.
Making the game faster to recover from error and to prevent them can reduce frustration and therefore increase engagement. Also when the players face an unsolvable problem they give up very quickly.
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