Simple Elegant UI Livens Up Forgotten Street-Game

The Zurb Crew did it again! During christmas holidays, I received a cute little package from them. Not knowing what to expect, I opened it with anticipation. The package contained two items; an elegant simple Zurb Christmas card, called ‘Rock-Paper-Scissors: Best Two out of Three’ and stack of cards.

The Christmas card suggested me having friendly matches of Rock Paper Scissors with friends or on ZURBword.com! More peculiarly, the stack of cards, drew my full attention. Each card had a colorful beautiful image of a hand, painted in delightful colors, showing hand-gestures of the good-old game of Rock Paper Scissors. As a UX researcher, what was interesting to me was the fact there were no rules or guidelines following the stack of cards. It was as if the users were supposed to figure things out by themselves.

Naturally, and as a user-oriented individual, immediately I started thinking of ways in which users would think and go about playing the cards. I thought of rules, such as ways to distribute the cards among players, the order of players, the number of sets, incentives, and rewards. So, you can imagine how my thoughts started whirling around the idea…

And then it darned me; the beauty of this idea was due to several other reasons:

• This game was a mirror of an already-existing ‘good-old-street-game’ that simply contained no rules and was already familiar to the users. The user mental model was already established!
• The innovative colorful presentation of the game made it refreshing, adding additional elements of enthusiasm and fun to an old forgotten game
• Simple beautiful UIs, can liven up old and forgotten elements in our lives

Here, the Zurb Crew, elegantly, brought one of my favorite (but forgotten) childhood street-games back into my everyday living. And they achieved this by presenting an old idea with simple, yet compelling, beautiful UI. This, I call art!