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.
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?
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.
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.
A GDC microtalk session on the types and value of player data for exploring retention. Slides are available free, but the video requires GDC Vault access.
Max Pears – level design guru and podcast host – invited me onto Level Design Lobby. We discussed the origins of games user research, the role player data has in gamedev, and how to test if things are fun.
At 4C in Prague I joined Shawn Stafford, Mia Lahteenmaki, Celia Hodent & Jason Schklar to discuss the challenges, practices, and methods of UX researchers.
Read More
4C Conference in Prague hosted a user experience track. I shared advice on the means by which player data can be used throughout development.
Read More
Running playtest sessions is remarkably difficult. It’s easy to overlook simple practices that can ruin the feedback you collect. This article considers common mistakes, through the lens of the playtester’s five senses.
To get unbiased and honest feedback from invited members of the general public you’ll need to carefully consider their every sight, sound and smell during your playtests. So what does a great playtest smell like?
Published by Oxford University Press, the Games User Research book is the first major text on the modern commercial application of player data in game development. I contributed two chapters on playtest lab design and player research methods.
