Game user researchers often talk about the importance of measuring design intent. What does this actually mean, though? Simply put, the design intent is the game designer’s vision. It is all the intentional decisions surrounding the fundamental aspects of a game that cause players to learn how to play...
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.
The first time I had to put together a research plan to thus inform a year’s worth of budgeting was no trivial task. Considering the needs of multiple teams and the differences of where they were in their development process meant that plans could not simply be duplicated at...
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.
A rigorous, iterative product development cycle includes plenty of testing, early and often. But what about when there is nothing yet to test? The answer is discovery. Discovery typically describes an early phase in product design. Exploratory research is a type of research done during this phase. Also known as...
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.
Playtesting your game is one of the best ways to improve the quality of your game by focusing on real-world player behaviour and discovering what players actually think about specific elements of your game. Not only can playtesting enable a better end product for your game through real feedback from...
So you’ve just finished a playtest and now you’re struck with the age-old question of “what now?” ringing in your head. You now have a plethora of information and data, and you need to be able to present it to others in a useful, productive way.
Social distancing in workplaces is here to stay for the foreseeable future, and that means a whole host of challenges for those of us primarily using one-to-one moderated sessions for playtesting. In order to keep players and staff safe, labs need redesigning, and research processes and pipelines need rethinking. At...