I vividly remember going with my daughter to purchase a brand-new Nintendo Switch on launch day of March 2, 2017. It was a fun day where I got to introduce my daughter to the wonderful world of Nintendo, a company that I have been enamored with since I was her age. I remember going home and booting up the Nintendo Switch and finding out very quickly that it is designed specifically to play games. The additional functionality you would find in other consoles was nowhere to be found. The system was designed for one thing: to play games.
At the time, the interface worked remarkably well when there were only a few games available. You can see in the image above that there is plenty of whitespace, it looks clean and is quite easy to navigate. Fast forward 3 years to the present and Nintendo has done little to evolve the experience. There are now over a thousand games on the eShop and the UI for the Switch is about the same. The thing to focus on here is not that it is wrong to have a minimal interface but that it can increase friction when you don't update the interface to support the influx of new games and more content.
The Nintendo eShop, which acts as Nintendo's marketplace has also only been minimally updated since launch in 2017. If you check Reddit, Twitter or any other social media - you'll find that findability is a particularly big issue. The underlying problem is that the search functionality was designed when there were a handful of games and now there are multitudes more. The search functionality is limited but they did recently add a filtering system that allows the user to open text search and narrow down by price range. Ultimately, this interface has never evolved past what was introduced in March 2017.
I love Nintendo and Nintendo Switch but have been very surprised by how little they have done to enhance the console and eShop experiences to increase usability and findability of their games. I imagine they are losing money from less-savvy users who simply cannot find games or worse - do not even know they exist. The lack of tools in both the interfaces puts users at a severe disadvantage in locating their preferred product. For a system that plays such enjoyable and whimsical games it sure is hard to find them in both the console or eShop.
The lessons below can be applied to any search interface where users need to find something.
Great products like the Switch require functionality that empowers users. Search is an incredibly important aspect of any system that catalogs products. In the case of the console itself and the eShop search is severely limited. I hope to see Nintendo push an update that provides users with a better search system in the near future.
