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Here's a simple UI change that'll improve the new player experience: change the quest reroll button's appearance

People on this sub like to talk a lot about changes that affect how new players perceive the game, but I haven't seen this mentioned before. I remember being a relatively new player (about 1-2 months) and hearing about quest rerolls on the sub. Now, I had no idea that quest rerolling was a thing by then, and assumed it was some exploit that wasn't intentionally put into the game. Only by looking up "quest rerolling" specifically did I figure out that the bright red X next to the quests was the "reroll quest" button.

There's no indication that rerolling quests is a thing in Hearthstone. It's not even a tooltip in the loading screens. The design of the bright red X implies that you're just straight up deleting the quest. It doesn't imply that you will get a new replacement quest immediately. It's simply misleading design.

You could argue that it's dumbing it down for new players (something something deckslots) but I'd argue that "dumbing it down" is actually smarter. Don Norman, director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego, calls this aspect "discoverability," which is a quality of design that describes "the ability to discover what operations one can do". Norman refers mostly to everyday objects in his research, most notably push/pull doors, but the same principles can be applied to U.I. design. This is a short 5 1/2 minute video on the topic that you can watch if you have some time.

This change is rather minor, and is by no means one of the biggest problems in Hearthstone today, but there shouldn't be too much effort involved in fixing it. I suggest a good replacement for the quest reroll icon could be either two circular arrows (like the Twitter retweet button) or a pair of dice.


  • Mike Donais

    Posted 8 years, 9 months ago (Source)

    Will do.




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