Posts Tagged ‘evaluating existing technologies’
[Prototype] – Some UX and Usability thoughts.
[Prototype] is an open-world superhero action game, released in 2009 which has striking similarities to the game Infamous. As part of my commitment to being a cheap gamer, I recentely picked it up second hand, and have just finished the story mode (aside from the comprehensive list of side missions, but I can never bring myself to go back to them after the story’s completion). Today I’ll share my thoughts on the usability and user experience aspects of the game that worked, and those which didn’t.
Blammo!
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 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.
Click to continue…
Usability Fail – Twitter on iPhone
This week I have another small usability issue that would be incredibly easy to identify and fix with small scale user testing. This time it’s with Twitter on the iPhone.
Typically people read the oldest tweets first, working up to the latest ones. The app is made to support this, retaining your ‘last read’ tweet, so you can read up from there.
Another feature of Twitter on the iPhone is, if you’ve been away a while, your timeline will be missing entries. You’ll see a tear, like in the picture below, and clicking this will download the missing tweets into your timeline.
Downloading missing tweets...
Now the usability issue here is small but incredibly annoying. When the tweets download, you’re presented with the latest ones first, and the oldest ones at the bottom. Completely the opposite to how people use the twitter app, reading the oldest ones first. Effectively this means scrolling down a list of potentially hundreds of tweets, looking for where you were before clicking the tear (which is not indicated).
The workaround I currently use is behaviour that would be spotted straight away, and fixed, by usability testing. To prevent being taken to the most recent tweet, the user has to ‘press’ the tear, but then scroll down to hide it from view, before taking a tentative peek up the timeline after 10 seconds or so to see if the act has been successful.
User testing would quickly identify this behaviour, and make it unnecessary by fixing the problem. Instead of showing you the most recent tweet when ‘filling in the blanks’ of the timeline, Twitter should take you to the oldest, hence not breaking the user’s flow, and aligning with how the rest of the app works.
Job done!
