Posts Tagged ‘user experience’
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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Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell – Book Review
Jenifer Tidwell’s book aims to not only help you make the right design decisions when creating an interface such as a webpage or application, but also aims to justify why you’ve made the right choices! Designing Interfaces takes the idea of a sourcebook, with a variety of design solutions at your fingertips, but expands this into a method of thinking about the user.
Ethnography as an application of third space theory
After many competing companies had failed, IBM were tasked with creating an air traffic control system. As you can imagine in this setting a correct solution was crucial – lives were at risk if anything went wrong. The first thing IBM’s designers did was go to the air traffic control tower for a few weeks, and watch how they worked. But why? And how did this influence the design process? Today, we look at ethnographic research, and how it is based in the theory of the ‘third space’.
Tony Gowland on playtesting for web-based games
Tony Gowland is a UK based video game designer and recently created the critically acclaimed puzzling platform game Tealy and Orangey (You should go try it now. I’ll wait…). I asked him to share his unique perspective on the role of user experience and play-testing in the game’s development. Tony shares with us his views on how user insight is particularly important for producing web based games, how he recruited playtesters and how the balance between ‘top-down design’ and playtesting influenced the production of his game.
