Steve Bromley - User Research

Usability and User Research for Websites, Software and Games

100 Rogues – Playability Heuristics Review

In the words of the Fast Show, this week I’ve mostly been playing 100 Rogues. I’ve never previously been able to get into Rogue-likes, having only played games in this genre briefly, before being scared off by the dungeon crawler’s core mechanics of ‘odds stacked against you’, ‘if you die you lose’, and ‘you will…

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UX needs an Agile environment

Agile is a relatively young software development methodology, with the Agile Manifesto being written less than 10 years ago. It claims to offer a significant advancement from traditional ‘Waterfall’ methodologies, not least because it allows user experience principles to be applied and integrated within the design process. Today I’ll cover a brief introduction to the…

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The importance of usability in Mobile Geolocation games.

Mobile geolocation games are a hot topic right now. The popularity of the iPhone, the potential for geolocation in HTML5, the geographic API integration with Twitter, and the rise of games like Gowalla and Foursquare all point to a significant shift in people’s perceptions of the potential of geolocation. I’ve recently been involved in the…

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Effective UI by the EffectiveUI team – Book Review

Effective UI is a new book by … EffectiveUI, which aims to give an introduction to the art of building a superior user experience.  EffectiveUI (the company) are a user experience agency from the US, recently known for building the iPad app Ideate, a tool for wire framing and sketching which uses pre-set templates for…

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Understanding players through biometrics

Last week Because of this, biometric readings have to be justified by another method, to give some understanding as to why the heart rate spikes at certain moments. Traditional UX methods, such as a post-test interview, are therefore needed in addition to biometric readings. However this reintroduces traditional UX problems. A player may not be…

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