Category: Articles and Talks

Ubisoft Director of Insights Lanie Dixon and I talk about user research methods:

At what point does proficiency in methods stop making you a better researcher?

Methods are the basis of our work as researchers – but ‘knowing your methods’ won’t win you credibility. Methods are not often universal among the stakeholders and partners we are working with and aren’t always the best tool to instigate change.

When should we make this shift of focus from being predominantly about the methods and move towards assessing risks and impact the research can have on the decisions that need to be made?

Watch the episode on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In my second tutorial talk on gamesUR foundations, I’ve covered the topic of learnability. How do players learn to play? What strategies can game design teams use to teach?

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Am I an ‘old timer’? Well, I guess this settles it.

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A podcast about the people behind interface design and development in video games – now including yours truly.

Ahmed Salama and I discussed the successes (and failures) of my wibblywobbly journey into games user research – along with discussion of the ‘flavours’ of user testing, where UXD and UXR intersect, and ‘what is a playtest anyway?’.

Listen online here, or search ‘game UX’ wherever you get your podcasts.

Another post for Player Research, this time covering some tips and tricks for usability testing your game effectively.

If there is no agreement on who our players are – or what they consider ‘high quality’ – then how do we make good creative decisions every day?

I spoke at ChinaJoy Developer Conference, alongside Keywords’ Li Tang. ChinaJoy is Asia’s largest video games expo.

User research sessions like these had been a staple of Control’s development.

Remedy even built a playtesting lab in their Espoo offices.

For the final months of development, Remedy partnered with playtesting specialists Player Research for larger-scale sessions and their fresh take on Control’s player experience.

Read my case study on Player Research’s Medium.

Thinking about the design of debug UI seems like misspent time. It is, by its nature, only to be used by our development team, and never to be seen by our eventual players. Why spend more than a single moment considering practicality, or utility, or legibility of UI destined for the trash?

Read my article on the Player Research Medium.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is full of interesting design choices. In this article I explore why their designers may have chosen to have players unlock their own UI quality-of-life upgrades, and if the design pattern has value for other titles.

Read the article on the Player Research Medium.

Heuristic Analyses – otherwise known as ‘expert analyses’ – are a powerful method in games user research. They’re also some of the most difficult to perform: no player data, no triangulation, and a game-wide remit.

At the 2018 gamesUR conference in San Fran I presented a talk in the Foundations track, based on a meta-analyses of expert reviews by junior researchers.