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.
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?
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In this talk from 2016 I shared lessons from designing Player Research’s large-format playtest labs in Brighton.
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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?
I joined Adams Greenwood-Erickson, Ben Lille, and Nana Wallace to discuss learnings for designing, constructing and utilising playtesting labs.
Flappy Bird was a simple viral hit. Why couldn’t competitor games copy its success? An article on the simple UX choices that kept Flappy Bird flying higher than its clones.
