Analyzing player interviews - Making sense of the data Playtests generate a lot of data. From interviews alone, you may have hours of players' thoughts and opinions to wade through. This can feel overwhelming, and it’s easy to get bogged down. How do we make sense of that, and work out what really matters? ... »
Running great player interviews - Making the most of your time with players Running interviews as part of your playtesting can offer a direct view into what is happening in players’ brains. This allows us to diagnose exactly what they are thinking, and understand the behavior we see in games - helping us make good game design decisions. ... »
Overcome the fear - preparing for your first playtest interview How to be confident that you’re deploying interviews at the right time, ensure you’ll learn useful things to improve your game, and remove the risk of catastrophic failures during your interviews. ... »
The Art of Player Recruitment: Design surveys to find reliable playtesters While they may seem straightforward, screeners are actually very easy to get wrong. This article has one objective: giving you the tips and resources to design your next screener that will get results you can rely on. ... »
Building Better Playtests in 6 Steps Elie Mouraud and Steve Bromley write about the best ways to playtest—and the mistakes to avoid when you’re just starting out. ... »
Steps to Research Goal Alignment Learn all you need to know on how to effectively communicate and design your user research for the development team. ... »
Cue-Behavior-Understanding: A Tool for End to End Evaluative Games User Research Game user researchers often talk about the importance of measuring design intent. What does this actually mean, though? Simply put, the ... »
Cross-Functional Collaboration in Games User Research The ability to deliver great user research within an organization is a team effort. Finding allies of support beyond the research discipline will elevate a good practice to an outstanding one. ... »
Learning Plans for Games User Research Roadmaps The first time I had to put together a research plan to thus inform a year’s worth of budgeting was ... »
Directions to Discovery In our previous blog post, we made the case for doing exploratory research in a game development context. In this post, we get into the details of actually doing it– drawing from an example can help unpack the process. ... »
The Case for Unmoderated Exploratory Research A rigorous, iterative product development cycle includes plenty of testing, early and often. But what about when there is nothing yet ... »
Competitor Analysis Playtesting Competitor analysis playtesting is a user research methodology that works wonderfully well in determining best practices for player experience in games. They are very flexible and can be used at different points in the development cycle. ... »
