Archive for the ‘UX Guides’ Category
The 5 secrets to happy players with Agile Games Development
Agile software development offers a fantastic opportunity to integrate user insight into the game development process, leading to better games. In this post, I’ll cover the main methods that can be used to integrate user insight into agile games development, and why this is important.
How to make an addictive strategy game
A few weeks ago we looked at how to make an addictive social game. Another mechanic that is a key element of successful games is the idea of eliminating ‘down-time’ and disrupting the flow at the end of a task. This has been applied with great success to create many addictive strategy games, such as Game Dev Story, and gives them that ‘unputdownable’ feeling. Today I’m looking at some examples of this in games such as Game Dev Story, Civ Rev and Farmville, and how these methods can be applied to your game: Click to continue…
How to make an addictive social game
Unlike some ‘triple A’ game developers, web-based social game designers quickly recognised how important usability and user experience are to their success. With customers being able to easily access their content for free, without making a commitment to paying for their gaming experience up-front, it’s extremely important to attract and retain players in the first few minutes.
Today I’ll be looking at the first 5 minutes of a successful social game, and highlighting which elements have made this game successful. In the future we’ll look at some games which have missed the point, and hence lost a large proportion of their customer base. From this, we can learn how to make an addictive social game. Click to continue…
How to avoid ethical pitfalls when working with users
As I’ve mentioned before, an ideal research study on users would be done through observation of their behaviour without their knowledge. Since people’s behaviour changes when under observation, or when people think they’re being observed, this has a direct effect on the quality of the data recorded.
As promoters of user insight in design, it’s therefore unfortunate that recording people secretly is unworkable in most real world situations. Much more importantly, as an aspect of scientific research, recording people in this manner is unethical. Today I’ll be considering why this is so, and look at how to do ethics correctly.
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What is user experience?
It’s been a year since I started this blog. Maybe it’s time to answer the question “What is User Experience”, and finally explain what the UX in the Blog’s title refers to.
It doesn't mean these guys
