Archive for the ‘Selling UX in Games’ Category
Selling UX in Games – Get everyone involved
This post forms part 2 of the series of selling UX to games companies, focusing on how you, as a proponent of user testing can overcome the major obstacles stopping game companies from investing in this emerging field. This week I’m focusing on visibility and reveal how getting people involved is key to selling UX testing. Specifically, I cover how to get people involved with usability and user experience testing, and the many advantages this will bring to both them and you.
Getting the whole team involved should be a priority even with the smallest scale tests. Not only is it a vital opportunity to sell the UX process, but it’ll give an undeniably clear example of the benefits that UX testing can bring, and help secure funding to ensure the next round of usability and user experience testing will not be on such a small scale.
Phase 2 of Testing
How to Do it:
So how can we get the whole team involved when user testing is taking place? This can be divided by time frame into 3 key areas.
Before a user testing session:
- Inform everyone that the tests will be happening – send a group email, including details on what will be happening, and when, to all interested parties. This could be sent a week in advance, and on the day of the tests, which will increase awareness of user testing and allow you to….
- Invite people to spectate – Let people know that they can watch the user testing, and that their input would be valued. Perhaps doughnuts will prove a big enough incentive to get people to give up some of their time to spectate.
- Ask priorities and ‘goals’ for investigation – Encourage people to spectate and be invested in the process by asking what they’re interested in finding out, and incorporating this into the user tests. This will be followed up by a debrief, described later.
Getting the preparation before a user test correct will help increase awareness of what you do, and how you can help people, break down misconceptions about user testing, and get the team invested in the process. If a team feel like their priorities matter to you, and that they can help shapre the process to ensure it will help them, they’ll become proponents of user experience and usability testing.
During a session
- Set up a remote viewing session – This should ideally be in a shared conference room, which allows people to spectate the tests in progress. This can be done using cheap/free equipment such as webcams, team viewer, and IM clients. Encourage attendance by advertising free food, and letting people know their priorities will be incorporated.
- Make space in the test for questions from the team – At the end of the session, check with the team if there is anything they want to be asked, for example did they want to know more about a subject’s thoughts when displaying behaviour the team found interesting. Note that it’s important that these questions go through you, as this’ll prevent potentially leading questions getting through the net, and increase the validity of the participant’s responses.
After a session
- Run a group debrief after each session – After the user testing session, meet with all the spectators, and give them freedom to discuss what they saw, and their conclusions from it. This allows the team to share their findings, and will encourage them to get involved again, especially since you will…
- Incorporate their findings into your final report – and give credit!
You don't want to be accused of stealing credit...
Advantages
So why go to all the effort of getting people involved with user testing?
The first advantage is that it will give credibility to your findings – not only will the team have helped shaped the conclusions, but they will have seen firsthand the evidence of that behaviour. It’s pretty hard to deny that, for example, the player doesn’t notice when they pick up a power up, having seen them miss it all day.
A secondary advantage through involving them with the process is that they’re likely to be more invested and enthused about the process – the sort of buzz that can help you gain an investment of more time or money in user testing.
The most useful advantage of getting the wider team involved is that they’ll add their own expertise and critical eye, highlighting areas of importance to them, and helping make observations in areas that you may miss. This can only help your final report, and gives a much wider legitimacy to the user testing.
Making the whole team aware, and involved in the user testing process therefore provides advantages to everyone – not only yourself, but to the whole team. It’ll help promote the process, and sell further user testing, and therefore is a key aspect of selling UX testing to games companies.
Selling UX in games – everyone else is doing it.
Following recent discussions, I’ve been thinking about how UX can often be misunderstood by developers. I’ve previously blogged about the misconception that usability and user experience testing is ‘just QA’. I’ve also seen people accuse it of ‘homogenising’ a game, and the belief that it’ll remove the game’s individuality and create a race of dull facebook clones.
This inaccurate view is set to change, with the rise of in-house and independent usability and user experience labs, and the breadth of academic research increasing our understanding of user experience. Hence I’m planning a series of articles about my thoughts on selling UX to game companies, helping you to communicate why game companies should be thinking about UX with their games. New posts in this series will come under the category ‘Selling UX in Games’
Everyone else is doing it
So why should your company be interested in games usability and user experience? Well I’m glad you asked…
- Many top selling games have gone through user experience testing
- The companies who have tried it recognise the benefit, and go on to do it again. In fact, one developer said…
- “It adds 10% to the metacritic score”
So let’s look in more depth at some games that have been reaping the benefits of user experience testing. These popular games all found success through user experience testing, and can serve as helpful examples when communicating why your company should be looking into user experience.
oh... well, thats easy to understand
Halo 3
Bungie recognised the value of the player experience when developing their multi-million selling Halo 3, and hence used user experience testing to create a game that was consistently fun, ensuring the player was never confused or lost. As documented in Isbister’s book Game Usability Microsoft’s usability labs were brought on board to ensure that Halo 3 was fun throughout.
Each area was thoroughly tested with real users, using techniques such as video and ‘heatmapping’ to log where the choke points were, where people got lost or stuck, and where they died. This could then be used to easily find problems in the game, and fix these areas. Fixes are typically simple, either by signposting the way to go, altering the enemies or adding points of interest to draw players (like a sparking light to encourage players to look up). This technique could also be applied to multiplayer maps, to balance the game’s flow, and make the game fair.
The success of this technique in Halo 3 has been extended to Halo Reach, where telemetric data was gained from a long public beta testing period. This gave real player information on how to balance and improve the game, and will undoubtedly be a large factor in its success.
To read more about the Halo 3 user testing experience, see the coverage in Wired.
Split Second
Brighton based Black Rock Studios explored user experience testing in their successful racing games ‘Pure’ and ‘Split Second’. With consultation from the usability lab Vertical Slice they tested over 100 players, getting new user’s experiences to fine tune aspects of the game, ensuring the pacing was correct, and that the game was delivering key ‘fun’ moments, which they denoted ‘woah moments’.
They built on this successful experience from Pure in developing Split Second, where they combined in house talent, who worked on testing users, with assistance from a local university, who performed an expert evaluation of the usability and user experience issues.
As documented by Graham McAllister, the developer believed that the process “added 10% to their metacritic score”. More information about how user experience testing helped Pure become a success can be found in the book Evaluating User Experience in Games.
Farmville
It’s not just the expensive AAA games which benefit from user testing. Zynga’s Farmville is everyone’s favourite facebook success story, and has gone from 0 t o 63 million active users in just a few months. This success is largely down to logging the user behaviour, and using this data to improve the player experience.
The online nature of facebook games allow user testing in a way not possible for traditional console games. Metrics can be gathered while people play to log behaviours, such as discovering how long a player spends on each task, which tasks are repeated, and where players get bored and drop off (i.e. only 85% of people make it past the tutorial).
An iterative design process, where the game is evaluated and improved every few days allow Zynga to take advantage of these metrics, and try to improve player behaviour. For example, by running two competing versions of the tutorial, they can judge which one retains more players, and implement that version fully. Repeating this process over every aspect of the game helps make Farmville the addictive success it has become.
Farmville distilled
Conclusion
So, want to help your game be more like these top titles? They all have user testing in common, and have explored them in very different ways, including in house testing, and recording player metrics. It’s likely one of these models will be applicable to your company. These games are all well respected, and most companies want to replicate these success stories.
Not enough to help you convince your company that games usability and user experience is worth pursuing? In the next ‘Selling UX in games’, I’ll be looking at getting team members involved in the UX process.
