Category: Articles and Talks

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.

4C Conference in Prague hosted a user experience track. I shared advice on the means by which player data can be used throughout development.

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.

A long-read article on the voice of games user experience.

Read it on Medium.

There were remarkably few talks or resources on the commercial realities of games user research: What does a typical day look like? What’s the workload to be expected?

At GamesUR SF 2017 I co-presented a talk on GamesUR foundations with Ubisoft Researcher Lanie Dixon to answer commonly-asked questions from the community.

What advice do hiring managers have for prospective applicants in games user researchers?

In this talk from 2016 I shared lessons from designing Player Research’s large-format playtest labs in Brighton.

During the heady launch period of Pokémon Go I published a teardown of its UX design. Could the learnability and usability of the game have been improved with some rudimentary UX know-how?