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Eight months before an interactive movie game was due to be shipped, its developers and funders decided that its user interface had to be radically simplified. The author was given the task of designing a new, simpler control scheme. This paper describes the redesign process, the design issues that arose and how they were resolved, the tests that were conducted to evaluate new design ideas, and concludes with an evaluation of the resulting design, lessons learned, and thoughts on user-interface design vs. game design.
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Jeff Johnson (1998) studied this question.