1. Better Understanding of Gamers

UX research helps video game designers better understand the needs, wants, and behaviors of gamers. This information can be used to create a game that is more enjoyable and engaging for the target audience. By conducting user research, game designers can uncover new insights into what gamers want from a game, such as specific types of characters, environments, or gameplay mechanics.

2. Improved Gameplay Mechanics

UX research can also lead to improvements in the gameplay mechanics of a game. By observing how gamers interact with the game, designers can identify areas where the gameplay may be too difficult or confusing. This information can be used to make changes to the gameplay mechanics that will make the game more enjoyable and accessible for gamers.

3. Increased Satisfaction and Enjoyment

One of the primary goals of game UX research is to increase gamer satisfaction and enjoyment while playing the game. By creating a game that is enjoyable and engaging, designers can increase the chances that gamers will continue playing the game, recommend it to others, and become loyal fans. This, in turn, can lead to increased sales and greater success for the game.

4. Improved User Interface

UX research can also lead to improvements in the user interface of a game. By understanding the needs and behaviors of gamers, designers can create an interface that is intuitive, easy to use, and improves the overall user experience. A well-designed user interface can make a game more accessible and enjoyable for gamers, leading to increased engagement and satisfaction.

5. Better Reception and Reviews

Finally, UX research can help ensure that a game is well-received by gamers and has positive reviews. By creating a game that provides a satisfying and enjoyable experience, designers can increase the chances that gamers will recommend the game to others and write positive reviews. This, in turn, can help increase sales and drive the success of the game.

In conclusion, UX research is an essential aspect of video game design that can significantly impact the success of a game. By conducting UX research, video game designers can create a game that is enjoyable and engaging for gamers, leading to increased engagement, satisfaction, and enjoyment. By doing so, they can increase the chances that the game will be well-received and achieve success in the competitive world of video games. If you could use a free analysis of your video game, reach out to the Situated Research team to get started.

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By now, Nintendo has made exactly 87,493,029 versions of Mario Kart since the game was first introduced in 1992 for the Super Nintendo. (Okay, the company has really made 13—which is still a lot!) But a new sequel coming this fall to the Nintendo Switch changes the formula in an enticing way, thanks to super experimental UX.

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit transforms the Nintendo Switch into a controller for an actual toy race kart. The kart is fitted with a camera, giving the player a first-person view of its perspective as it whizzes around your living room, bedroom, or wherever you have some open floor space to play.

How does the game build your course? You place a few gates that are bundled with the game on the floor. From there, how the exact setup and customization works is unclear (perhaps vision AI is involved?), but Nintendo—alongside its partner developer Velan Studios—demonstrates that one of several tracks, from a simple oval to complicated curves, can be set up to avoid existing couches, coffee tables, and perhaps even sleeping cats.

As you race your kart around the course, all sorts of augmented reality (AR) effects, ranging from glowing boundaries, to power ups, to your racing competitors, will appear on the screen, as if they exist in your actual home. If you run over a virtual item, like a nitro-boosting mushroom, the kart will actually accelerate. If you hit a troublesome banana peel, the car will actually lose some control. Oh, and assuming you have friends with their own games, up to four players can race their karts together in the same space.

With few exceptions, augmented reality has been little more than a gimmick. Snapchat’s zany face filters are still the most successful commercialization of this technology that, not so long ago, the tech world heralded as the next big thing.

Microsoft’s Hololens AR headset is technically impressive, but it’s being marketed as an enterprise tool to businesses (which demonstrates pretty clearly that it’s not ready for the mainstream just yet). The hyped company Magic Leap, with billions in venture capital from investors like Google, has done little more than release a developer version of its headset to mediocre reviews while it hangs on for life. The hardware is simply too expensive, too bulky, but, most of all, too useless to really be worth buying for a vast majority of people. Plus, it’s antisocial by nature to be experiencing a different version of reality than the people around you.

But Nintendo is doing what it does best. It’s figuring out how to transform a gimmick into shared fun—and make it halfway affordable, too. A lot of that comes down to Nintendo just understanding the ergonomics around technology and play. For years, AR demos tasked you to hold up your phone like a little window to peek through, to do something like transform a magazine cover into an animation. These novelties wore thin quickly because they’re more physically awkward than visually amazing.

Nintendo is taking a similar approach here to its predecessors. But instead of utilizing the camera in your phone, it’s built it into the kart. That allows you to play a game like you always do (sitting on your couch), but experience all of these enticing and additive effects of AR. No, Nintendo isn’t aiming as high as Magic Leap, teasing an entire world of digital objects that you can reach out and touch. But Nintendo is competent enough at game design that it’s figured out how to work with what it has to create an AR experience that’s both new and destined to be massively successful.

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit will be out for $100 on October 16. The last version of Mario Kart sold more than 25 million copies to date. And if Home Circuit is only a fraction as successful, it will still be one of the most profitable demonstrations of AR ever built.

Written by: Mark Wilson, Fast Company
Posted by: Situated Research

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Measuring Engagement

Prior research has shown the importance of engagement in game play. Creating a sense of flow, or a feeling where players are immersed into game play to the point where they lose track of their surroundings, has a huge effect on players’ perceptions of a game.

Games user research, when properly done, incorporates behavioral psychology into the research to observe players’ actions during gameplay. This yields insight into engagement levels, which are affected by a steady increase in difficulty over time (to challenge game players’ ability) and are encouraged by a great story line to immerse game players.

Measuring Player Communication

Besides the obvious task of watching players interact with the game interface, the observation of player-to-player communication can yield great insight into game play. Team-based activities, or even collaborative game play, can help researchers observe players’ strategies. In MMOGs, players might communicate through text or voice inside the game environment, and classic games might have players communicate via their proximity to one another.

Player communication yields great insight into how players learn to play a game and how they develop strategies to win a game. Great user research should use a research method where players are not coaxed or guided by researchers, and feel as if they are in a natural environment as to not bias their activity while playing games. Rigorous game research methods can use these factors to their advantage to achieve findings that are more accurate than traditional deductive, hypothesis-driven studies.

Affordances of the User Interface

While the broader experience of game play needs to be measured to gauge the overall player experience, examining the affordances of the user interface is a useful task to see what players perceive as possible actions in the game. These perceptions provide game players a foundation for creating strategies within the game. All aspects of the interface that can be interacted with, as well as those that gamers perceive as actionable, should be observed to inform game design. These perceived actions within a game suggest to gamers their possibilities for both playing and winning the game.

Often, critical actions might be overlooked by gamers. In line with theories of learning, a scaffolding difficulty structure should be achieved to create a feeling of flow for gamers. Game research can provide useful insight into ways that game players make use of a game interface, and lead to modifications in its discovery and use (via a nudge, animation, tutorial, etc.) that will provide salience to particular actions within the game that allow game players to learn, progress, and create engaging game play within the game.

Conclusion

Many of the current trends in game design are leading to amazing new games: including VR / AR (virtual / augmented reality), amazing graphics approaching lifelike detail, and engaging online multiplayer experiences. However, many of the properties of classic games offer players an engaging experience without advanced graphics, making use of a basic story, simple gameplay, and scaffolding difficulty structure to engage players. Game developers of all sizes can create games that maximize engagement by utilizing game research to create games that utilize the perfect mix of these features.

Good usability, afforded by the game user interface, helps players develop strategies for playing and winning games. Creating flow, where players lose track of their surroundings while immersed in game play, can be achieved by creating the right mix of engaging gameplay, player communication, and a scaffolding difficulty structure where players learn and accomplish tasks in the game.

About the Author

Matthew Sharritt, Ph.D., President and Co-founder of Situated Research, specializes in user-experience (UX) research and usability testing within software and video games. Dr. Sharritt’s research focuses on collaborative learning during playtesting and exploration, yielding insights in how to construct games that flow with engaging gameplay and collaborative interaction. The Situated Research team has provided independent expertise to the game industry across a variety of research projects. Learn more at https://www.situgames.com.

The post Games User Research: Driving Development with Actionable Insights appeared first on Situated Research.

The online videogame Fortnite Battle Royale was launched just a year ago in September 2017. Since then the game had amassed 125 million active players by June and made $1.2 billion for its developer Epic Games. It has also been linked to 200 divorces in the U.K. and a case of aggravated harassment where a 45-year-old man threatened to kill an 11-year-old boy after losing to him in the game.

Love it or hate it, the question is: How has Epic Games created a game with such enormous social, economic, and psychological impact?

Fusing elements from recent hits such as Minecraft, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and Overwatch, the game is deceptively simple: Up to 100 players are placed in a constantly shrinking environment, and the objective is to be the last person (or team) standing. Think Hunger Games and you’re not too far off.

Fortnite‘s success rests on three principles: accessibility, sociality, and spectacle.

[Screenshot: Epic Games]

ACCESSIBILITY

The game is completely free to play, and, as of August 2018, it’s available on all major platforms, from consoles to phones to PCs and Macs.

It’s very simple to play: Stay alive, and if something moves, shoot it. It can also be played in very short bursts. The average match goes for 20 minutes or so.

The free-to-play business model emerged in the late 1990s as the internet drove a social and cultural shift in how we view and use entertainment. People were now less inclined to pay for a one-off, single piece of static content, and more inclined to invest in an evolving library of content accessible at any time.

This shift is often described as a move from offering a product to offering a service. Game makers were, as ever, early adopters, providing downloadable content to users for a fee.

Downloadable content became commonplace as broadband availability and smartphone adoption grew. Soon developers were releasing “freemium” games with “in-app purchases”: You can play the game for free, but gain a bunch of advantages by paying.

But converting players to purchasers is a tough business: A 2% conversion rate is not uncommon.

Fortnite has managed an astonishing 68.8% conversion rate, with the regular spend being $85. More pointedly, the average spend is 850 “V-bucks,” Fortnite‘s in-game currency.

This is a classic trick of psychology known by theme parks and banks: Exchange real money for something more abstract (like Disney dollars or payment by card tap), and the pain of parting with your hard-earned cash lessens.

Epic is also very active here, listening to the player base and constantly updating content to tease more V-bucks from players’ wallets.

[Screenshot: Epic Games]

SOCIALITY

This leads into the second principle: Fortnite is built to be social.

When you pay, you’re mostly buying cosmetic items, such as a new outfits, dances, or taunts. These items are not about providing gameplay advantages, but about players wanting to express themselves.

Accessibility once more helps. Since the game is free and on every major platform, users can play with friends whether on their phone, console, or computer.

Enough play time and customization generates a sense of psychological investment, as a person’s sense of identity becomes linked to the game.

At this point Fortnite can activate psychological triggers, often based on negative emotions such as FOMO (fear of missing out) by sending notifications on your platform of choice whenever a friend starts or joins a game. This pushes players to engage with the game once again.

Of course, the downside to this is feeling compelled to play even at inopportune moments. Thus a U.S. survey reports that 35% of students have skipped studying to play, and 20.5% of workers have missed work for Fortnite shenanigans. And, as I said earlier, an addiction to Fortniteand other online games has been mentioned in 200 divorces in the U.K.

[Screenshot: Epic Games]

SPECTACLE

It’s well known by game developers that, for a player, losing a match is a horrible moment. So if you’re going to make your player fail, make failure fun.

Building on sociality, Fortnite makes failure a spectator sport. When you’re eliminated, you get to watch your teammates, or the player who eliminated you.

This is of course a prime opportunity for your antagonist to unleash their latest and greatest dance moves and taunts, but it also makes for great streaming material.

One YouTube and Twitch streamer, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, has made up to $500,000 a month streaming Fortnite sessions from his bedroom (even playing with hip-hop royalty Drake, setting a new Twitch viewer record). He’s so popular that he is due to appear on the front cover of the October issue of ESPN magazine.

The game’s cartoonish style drives a lot of this spectacle, allowing a broad spectrum of fashion choices: from tooled-up cyberpunk ninjas firing lasers to tomato-headed grenadiers shooting “boogie bombs” that make enemies dance upon contact.

This again reinforces accessibility and sociality, as everyone feels welcome, and everyone finds something expressive of themselves.

[Screenshot: Epic Games]

HOW LONG CAN FORTNITE LAST?

The question now, as with any gaming trend, is how long this can last. While games such as Pokémon Go often have blockbuster openings, revenue quickly declines.

One year on from launch, Fortnite is still going strong–at the moment–and releasing on Android in August opened up a whole new market.

Whether Epic Games can keep up the pace, offering fresh new content appealing to its player base, is an open question.

Steven Conway is senior lecturer of games and interactivity at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Written by: Steven Conway  (via Fast Company)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post The clever UX that made Fortnite a $1.2 billion sensation appeared first on Situated Research.

The sky is falling! Social media is the new scapegoat of the month. Headlines claim it is ruining our relationships, dismantling our society, destroying our very lives! In particular, the most frequent victims are presumed to be teenagers. Sometimes the accused culprit is not social media, but the phones that make it so accessible. Is it true? Only time will tell … but in the ’50s, the demon was comic books; in the ’60s, rock and roll; and in the ’80s, video games. My mother was convinced that my love of comic books and science fiction was going to rot my brain. Now, of course, these things are mainstream and no longer the sole domain of teens. But there’s always a new thing for people to worry about or blame for the decline and fall of civilization.

I’m particularly sensitized to that criticism of video games. I designed and programmed my first computer game in college in 1976 – in fact, inspired by that very love of science fiction I had as a child. When I graduated in 1980, my first job out of college was entering the then-infant video game industry. I’ve never left. So when pundits blamed games for destroying society, even causing teen violence and rebellion, I took it personally. I’ve always felt that video games can be magical, marvelous entertainment. I hoped that one day they’d be seen as not just safe, but actually good for us. That day is finally here.

Virtual treatment, real results

For many years now, researchers and doctors have gradually built up solid scientifically verified evidence that existing games can improve the lives of the people who play them. At the same time, increasing numbers of games have been created with the idea of ‘boosting health’ as a direct goal.

Fast action games like Call of Duty have been found to improve visual perception and the ability to make correct decisions quickly. Other research has shown promise in using a game to treat the underlying causes of depression. It’s possible that games may be able to diagnose the onset of degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and perhaps even slow their progression.

Games have shown promise in the realm of physical fitness, too. Starting 20 years ago, the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution was credited with getting a lot of passive couch potatoes up, moving, and losing weight, and it’s still spawning sequels. Games on mobile phones like Zombies, Run! and Pokémon Go have encouraged players to get out and move in the world, and many track their exercise and calorie expenditure as they do so. VR holds promise here too, with the chance to get your exercise by racing the Tour de France on your exercise bike, or by flying like a bird. There are even current ventures bringing gameplay to gym class and possibly making dodgeball fun even for nerds!

Doctors with joysticks

It turns out that doctors in training, like most people these days, are often avid game players. That has presented a great opportunity for using them as part of their medical education. Although games have yet to replace classes, they’ve been shown to help laparoscopic surgeons reduce errors by 37 percent while increasing their speed by 27 percent when used as warm-up exercises. When you consider that athletes, musicians, dancers, and others who need to do precision work with their muscles all limber up before their tasks, it makes sense that the right kind of practice helps surgeons, too.

Other companies are rushing to use VR to train anesthesiologists or to give caregivers a first-hand sense of how their patients with macular degeneration see the world. The VR simulations aren’t all games, but the vast majority of VR engineers are coming from the games industry.

Prescribing play

Perhaps the most exciting application of games in the modern world are the ways in which doctors are using games to treat their patients. Realistic war games have helped soldiers recover from PTSD by simulating the experiences that trigger their problem, a method to gradually desensitize them to reduce their symptoms long term. Other games have been used in similar ways in conjunction with therapy to treat phobias like fear of heights, flying, and spiders. And currently, virtual reality games have shown great promise in pain relief for acute pain, reducing or even eliminating the need for narcotics when changing the dressings on burn victims. VR is also showing promise in helping stroke victims recover control over their movement, and in relieving the perception of pain in “phantom limbs” experienced by amputation patients.

Last September saw the FDA approval of a mobile phone app to be used (in conjunction with therapy) to treat addiction. The developers call their app a “Prescription Digital Therapeutic” and, although it’s not a game, it’s a big step to have software approved to treat something as serious as Substance Abuse Disorder.

But a real game designed to be an active treatment for ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) was not far behind. By December, the FDA gave preliminary clearance to a video game made by a team consisting of both game developers and neuroscientists from UCSF. In a large controlled trial of children and teens diagnosed with ADHD, the group who used the game showed significant improvement compared to a control group. The team hopes that soon it will become the first game to win FDA approval on the same terms as a prescription drug. In style, the game is part racing game, part Pokémon Snap, but with many unique twists to improve attention and focus.

We are moving into a future where games train our doctors, monitor our health, and treat our illnesses. It may seem a bit outrageous now, but if comic books led me into a career making video games and often become the basis of mainstream movies, why can’t video games inspire the next generation of doctors and become the basis of medical treatment? Video games are intimately connected to learning, attention, and the brain. It isn’t an accident that they are also proving to be useful to our mental and physical health. Maybe they’ll even be able to reverse my dreaded comic book brain rot!

This is part of a series of columns written by developers speaking at the Game Developers Conference in March.

Noah Falstein is a freelance game designer and producer, and was one of the first 10 employees at LucasArts Entertainment and Dreamworks Interactive. Last year he left Google after serving four years as their Chief Game Designer.

Written by: Noah Falstein, via Rolling Stone
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Road to GDC: I’m Not A Doctor, but I Simulate One in VR appeared first on Situated Research.

The first step to improving your own UX (and reaping the business benefits) is to conduct a usability assessment of your product, software or website. This process uncovers the most common problems. Often, usage analytics indicate UX issues with your product. Usability testing explains these issues. 

We regularly see websites that are underperforming because they were designed without the end user in mind. In these situations, executives who think they know their users typically make design decisions. As a result, websites are designed for the executives and not for the customers. The same holds true for software and video games.

Proper UX design requires understanding users’ needs and creating a solution that solves their problems and helps complete their tasks in the easiest and quickest way possible. To do this properly, you need to get inside users’ heads by interviewing them and observing them while they interact with the product. With continuous testing and adjustments, you can improve ease of use, reduce mistakes and increase overall customer satisfaction.

At Situated Research we conduct our research a little differently. In a separate article, Capturing Feedback in a User’s Natural Environment, we discussed the benefits to user testing without the use of a lab or moderator. Our team video tapes the user, in their natural environment, using the product as they would in everyday life. We then take the video and analyze it by using our cloud based research platform, Transana.

Conducting research this way allows us to uncover hidden usability issues that otherwise would not have been found. It also allows the user to act as they would in their everyday life and not feel like they are in a lab setting getting tested. The worst thing you can do is have a user feel like they are the ones being observed and tested and not the product.

To learn more about understanding what your customers think about your products, reach out today and tell us about your project.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: Situated Research

The post What Do Your Customers Think of Your Product? appeared first on Situated Research.

I’ve been spoiled by modern UX design. 

The sentiment is pretty universal. Hugon on the Quarter to Three forum writes:

“When I think ‘console RPG’ I think pages of fairly inscrutable character info and bad navigation. You cry tears of joy if you can just get a basic item comparison.”

Thanks, “good UX.”

In the past, I expected everything to be a bit rubbish. Sitting in the back of my dad’s car, smashing the Nokia keypad trying not to let the snake eat its own tail — I wasn’t thinking about it any deeper than “hehe,” “wow” or “ahhh…”

Replaying the old classics wasn’t all bad, though. As well as the experiences that no one would be caught dead designing, there were a few things I noticed that have carried over into highly praised apps.

This post is about the evolution of UX — although we know it now as a way to keep users sticking around — this is from a time period when it wasn’t so much of a big deal.

I got to play a lot of games, record the screen and see UX and video games in a new light. It’s about the good and bad parts of 1990s Japanese video games, and what we should (and shouldn’t) learn from them today.

“Pulsing circles” as part of a tutorial

In the first 10 minutes of Final Fantasy III, you come across a small, glowing light — something that’ll entice any gamer in search of loot. What you get instead is a lesson — not in the instruction booklet that nobody would bother to read, but baked into the gameplay:

I’ve looked before at how Microsoft hid user onboarding lessons inside Minesweeper and tricked users into adapting to a GUI, and it seems this is an equally ancient example.

In Final Fantasy III, however, it’s exciting because it’s exactly like a tactic used recently by Slack (and plenty of other SaaS apps):

And, because Slack’s user onboarding process has since changed, here’s a .gif of the same idea in action in Process Street:

It’s the same idea. A transitory, floating point of interest — sparkles on a cave floor. A tiny piece of information hidden in the UI to help users learn as they go, instead of having to break out the biblically oversized user manual.

The death of the instruction manual and move toward learning by doing is common in all kinds of onboarding, much as relying on someone to get from 0-60 on their own isn’t necessary or expected when there are other ways of teaching.

Microinteractions to show time and care in design

In Nick Babich’s article on microinteractions, he says:

”The best products do two things well: features and details. Features are what draw people to your product. Details are what keep them there. And details are what actually make our app stand out from our competition.”

One example of a “delightful” microinteraction is the Twitter heart. It used to be a case of clicking the star and it turning from gray to yellow; now, as we all know, this happens:

There are some pretty good arguments against spending design time on microinteractions, but in video games, it’s part of the immersive experience.

Chrono Trigger is one of the few SNES RPGs I’ve played where poking around mundane rooms pays off. In the very first room, when your mum wakes you up, it’s possible to open and close the curtains.

In a genre where the game is mostly story-driven and the actual mechanics seem to be an afterthought, this is pretty awesome. As you can see, I had to do a quintuple take:

Menus have (thankfully) improved a hell of a lot

You can’t appreciate the wonders of modern menu navigation if you’ve not been through some of the more poorly designed UIs from the 1990s.

Now, I know it’s not the primary concern of RPGs (and, in fact, something they’re most often criticized for anyway), but the first menu system from Breath of Fire just doesn’t make sense. Bearing in mind this menu is presented before the game has ever started, check this out:

The key issues:

• There’s no quantification of what “Fast,” “Norm” and “Slow” even is.
• The Key Configuration section for Y, X, L and R is confusing because the arrow is seemingly floating in the middle of nowhere
• When you press “Choose” on the floating arrow, there’s no explanation as to what any of these things are. Why would(n’t) I want “Magic” assigned to R? What even does it mean?

It’d be far more helpful not to force this before gameplay, and to leave it as a preferences menu somewhere in-game.

It’s unfair to compare menus from 1990s games to modern SaaS products, but thankfully, I didn’t have to. Here’s a much better menu from Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, a game known for its elegant design:

It even comes with a little onboarding primer, unlike the menu in Breath of Fire, which surfaced before I even saw what the game looked like.

Filling user details with smart defaults

Thanks to social media, smarter design and the realization that no one wants a blank profile picture or the need to spend time filling in their details, information like thumbnail and full name is often pulled in automatically by apps when you sign up. Take Medium, for example:

Like Samuel Hullick points out in his teardown of Peach’s user onboarding flow, that’s much better than the default silhouette and .

Here’s a pre-cursor to that approach from Chrono Trigger, kindly filling in your default name, with the cursor ready to overwrite left-to-right if you want to choose another name:

This reduces friction at the most vital moment — first use.

Show which parts of the screen are interactive

At a high level, a user interface consists of two groups of things: things with which you can interact and things with which you can’t.

Badly designed interfaces make it difficult to decide straight away whether an element is interactive, whether it’s for displaying data or just for decoration.

With SNES games, it’s sometimes a matter of trial and error to find which parts of the screen you can interact with, but unlike apps with freeform (mouse/touchscreen) controls, the number of options is limited to wherever you can move the cursor with the arrow keys. If you can’t move your cursor there, you can’t interact with it.

That leads to confusing interfaces like the one I looked at earlier from Breath of Fire — how was I supposed to know there’s an input field there?

In the same way Final Fantasy III shows you a part of the environment is interactive, there are parallels in modern apps.

Check out Peach (left) and Buffer (right) for a contrast of how interactive UI elements are displayed:

With touch/mouse-controlled UIs, the user could theoretically click anywhere. The awkward Breath of Fire menu shows that interactions can be misleading, even when there are limited places to “click.” Peach’s enticing button looks tappable, but it gives you an error message; Buffer has the balance right by showing buttons you can’t interact with by keeping them gray.

Storytelling to hook the user’s interest

Every classic Final Fantasy game follows the same structure. Like a Shakespeare play, you’re thrown right into the middle of a story, with only the tone of the start screen for context — like, “What’s all this lightning?”

The story unfolds over the course of a painfully slow 5-10 minute cut scene of sprites shuffling around, and references to an array of names and places you have no idea about.

But that’s what fantasy stories are, right?

They don’t start at the beginning of time, and even if they follow the dumbed-down “This is me, I’m from a town called X” format, you’re going to be thrown into a universe you never previously knew existed. (In an earlier article I addressed how astonishing your user isn’t the best idea.)

It’s the same deal when you start with a new app. Part of the user onboarding process is reducing that initial overwhelm factor. Quartz does a good job at this by situating the app in a familiar environment — texting — with a talkative AI.

Did 1990s video games care about UX, anyway?

Setting aside some obvious clunkers like Dragon Age 6 and Breath of Fire, it seems like the user experience of SaaS apps have been informed by the past. Some, like Duolingo and Habitica, take direct inspiration from old-school RPGs.

It’d be unfair to say 1990s video games didn’t care about UX, but unlike today — 14 years after the first major UX primer came out — it wasn’t a high priority.

While SNES technology limited the complexity and elegance of the games it ran, it’s only clumsy in retrospect because we’ve been spoiled by silk-smooth interfaces and “delight.”

After all, until now I never complained about Final Fantasy’s UI — I sat down, shut up and played it until 4 am.

FEATURED IMAGE: AKIRA TORIYAMA

Written by: Benjamin Brandall, TechCrunch
Posted by: Situated Research

The post What UX Designers Can Learn from 1990s Japanese Video Games appeared first on Situated Research.

A number of startups are working on this tech, with an aim to convince VR gear manufacturers such as Oculus Rift and HTC Vive to incorporate the feature in a next generation device. They include SMI, Percept, Eyematic, Fove and Eyefluence, which recently allowed USA Today to demo its eye-tracking tech.

“Eye-tracking is almost guaranteed to be in second-generation VR headsets,” says Will Mason, cofounder of virtual reality media company UploadVR. “It’s an incredibly important piece of the VR puzzle.”

At present, making selections in VR or AR environments typically involve moving the head so that your gaze lands on a clickable icon, and then either pressing a handheld remote or, in the case of Microsoft’s HoloLens or Meta 2, reaching out with your hand to make a selection by interacting with a hologram.

As shown in Eyefluence’s demonstration, all of that is accomplished by simply casting your eyes on a given icon and then activating it with another glance.

“The idea here is that anything you do with your finger on a smartphone you can do with your eyes in VR or AR,” says Eyefluence CEO Jim Marggraff, who cofounded the Milpitas, Calif-based company in 2013 with another entrepreneur, David Stiehr.

“Computers made a big leap when they went from punchcards to a keyboard, and then another from a keyboard to a mouse,” says Marggraff, who invented the kid-focused LeapFrog LeapPad device. “We want to again change the way we interface with data.”

Eye Tech Not Due for Years

As exciting as this may sound, the mainstreaming of eye-tracking technology is still a ways off. Eyefluence execs say that although they are in discussions with a variety of headset makers, their tech isn’t likely to debut until 2017. Other companies remain largely in R&D mode, and Fove has a waitlist for its headset’s Kickstarter campaign.

The challenges for eye-tracking are both technological and financial. Creating hardware that consistently locks onto an infinite variety of eyeballs presents one hurdle, while doing so with gear that is light and consumes little power is another.

And while a number of companies in the space have managed to land funding – Eyefluence has raised $21.6 million in two rounds led by Intel Capital and Motorola Solutions – some tech-centric VCs are sitting on the sidelines while they wait for the technology to mature and for headset makers to make their moves.

“What eye-tracking will do will be powerful, but I’m not sure how valuable it will be from an investment standpoint,” says Kobie Fuller of Accel Partners. “Is there a multi-billion-dollar eye-tracking company out there? I don’t know.”

Among the unknowns: whether the tech will be disseminated through a licensed model or if existing headset companies will develop it on their own.

Still, once deployed eye-tracking has the potential to revolutionize the VR and AR experience, Fuller expects.

Specifically, eye-tracking will “greatly enhance interpersonal connections” in VR, he says, by applying realistic eye movements to avatars.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who presciently bought Oculus for $2 billion, is banking on VR taking social interactions to a new level.

“The most exciting thing about eye-tracking is getting rid of that ‘uncanny valley’ (where disbelief sets in) when it comes to interacting through avatars,” says Fuller.

Less Computing Power

There are a few other ways in which successful eye-tracking tech could revolutionize AR and VR beyond just making such worlds easy to navigate without joysticks, remotes or hand gestures.

First, by tracking the eyes, such tech can telegraph to the VR device’s graphics processing unit, or GPU, that it needs to render only the images where the eyes are looking at that moment.

That means less computing power would be needed. Currently, a $700 Oculus headset requires a powerful computer to render its images. Oculus’s developer kit with a suitable computer costs $2,000. “If you can save on rendering power, that could significantly lower the barrier to entry into this market for consumers,” says UploadVR’s Mason.

And second, by not just tracking the eyeball but also potentially analyzing a person’s mood and logging in details about their gaze, AR/VR headsets are in a position to deliver targeted content as well as give third-party observers insights into the wearer’s state of mind and situational awareness.

Police Use

The former use case would appeal to in-VR advertisers, while the latter would come in handy for first responders.

“Police and paramedics are looking for an eyes-up, hands-free paradigm, and eye-tracking can bring that,” says Paul Steinberg, chief technology officer at Motorola Solutions, an investor in Eyefluence.

Steinberg sketches out a scene from what could be the near future.

A police officer on patrol has suddenly unholstered his gun. Via his augmented reality glasses with eye-tracking, colleagues at headquarters are instantly fed information about his stress level through pupil dilation information.

They can then both advise the officer through a radio as well as activate body cameras and other tech that he might have neglected to turn on in his stressed state. What’s more, another officer on the scene can instantly scan through a variety of command center video and data feeds through an AR headset, flipping through the options by simply looking at each one.

“We would have to work with our (first responder) customers to train them how to use this sort of tech of course, but the potential is there,” says Steinberg. “But we’re not months away, we’re more than that.”

Demo Shows Off Ease of Use

An Eyefluence indicates that eye-tracking technology isn’t a half-baked dream.

Navigating between a dozen tiles inside a first-generation Oculus headset proves as easy as shifting your gaze between them. Making selections – the equivalent of clicking on a mouse – is also equally intuitive. At no time does the head need to move, and hands remain at your side.

After about 10 minutes in the demo, it feels antiquated to pop on a VR headset and grab a remote to click through choices selected with head movements.

Marggraff says Eyefluence’s technical challenges included making technology that could respond in low and bright light, accounting for different size pupils and ensuring that power consumption is minimal.

But, he adds, his team remains convinced of the inevitability of its product: “Just like when we started tapping and swiping on our phones, we’re going to eventually need a better interface for AR and VR.”

Written by: Marco della Cava, USA Today (via Presence)
Posted by: Situated Research

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Last week, I attended the Games User Research Summit (GamesUR or GUR), which happened in connection with the Game Developer Conference (GDC), but was hosted separately at Electronic Arts (EA) in Silicon Valley — as you can tell, these guys love their acronyms.

With EA being the gracious hosts, the conference happened under the watchful eyes of an enormous dragon and the break room was festooned with large posters of the classic Star Wars characters. It was clear just from the surroundings that we were not in Kansas anymore. (Or, rather, not in the realm of mainstream UX. Here really be dragons.)

It was clear from the terminology bantered around in the talks that games are different from other design projects. Take, for example, the game Rainbow Six Siege (inevitably abbreviated as R6S, because they do like acronyms). One of the UX metrics tracked during the testing of this game was the kill/death ratio, which, admittedly, is not one of the things we teach in our otherwise comprehensive Measuring User Experience seminar. (This ratio is the number of opponents you kill divided by the number of your team members who die during a death match. Another term we don’t use much in mainstream design projects.)

Much Remains the Same

Despite the dragon and the death matches, I actually saw many similarities between the games user-experience (GUX) world and the mainstream UX world.

In a brilliant opening talk, Brandon Hsuing (Director of Insights at Riot Games) explained how he has organized his department of 70 people. A main takeaway was the benefit of embedding UX researchers within product teams, both at the feature-design level, but ideally at the higher level of the complete game. Twenty years ago, at Sun Microsystems, we made the same key point of using a matrix organization where researchers report to a central, specialized group but sit with a product team in a dotted-line relationship.

Since Riot Games has close to 2,000 employees, a department of 70 insight professionals might seem too low for the recommended share of 10% of project teams being allocated to user research. However, because Riot is both a studio (designing and implementing games) and a publisher (distributing and selling games), much of the total staff must be allocated to the publishing side. So an insights team of 70 may actually be close to the recommended 10% of the people actually building the new products.

The main innovation I got from Hsuing’s talk lies in the very name of his department: the Insights Team. The wording may seem like superficial propaganda, but in reality it makes a profound point: the goal of research is to increase company profitability by improving products and raising conversion rates. We can achieve these profitability goals only if the UX teams deliver actionable insights and drive the company’s development activities at both the tactical level (better design) and the strategic level (discovering customer needs and building products to meet and exceed these needs). Most companies’ UX maturity is not even at the tactical level yet, but to reach the strategic level, we do have to don that “insight team” hat.

I was pleased to hear that Riot’s Insights Team encompasses the company’s user research, as well as their market research and analytics. Analytics and UX should be joined at the hip, but are too often separated in different departments. And market research is usually kept even further from UX. This despite the many benefits of integrated customer insights that triangulate findings from multiple methods.

Another presentation that elicited some déjà-vu moments came from Laura Hammond from UEgroup, who talked about testing gesture-based games. She recommended avoiding swivel chairs when testing young children, because kids get too easily distracted by moving around on the chair. True, but an observation we made in 2001 in the first edition of our report from usability testing of children using websites. The kids who were 6 years old in 2001 are now 21 and thus qualified to participate in our current user research with young adults/Millennials. It’s nice to know that the next generation of children is the same, at least when it comes to swivel chairs in the usability lab.

To record the test sessions and get the gestures on video, the researchers recommended using 3 video cameras: from above, from the side, and facing the user. Exactly what we did 20 years ago in the hardware human-factors lab to record system administrators installing hard drives in servers. Testing 3D user interfaces requires more equipment than studying 2D websites.

Of course, Hammond’s talk had also new observations, specific to games for the Intel RealSense camera (which requires users to control the game by moving their hands in front of the camera). For example, the researchers needed to include the users’ hand size as one of the screening criteria when recruiting test participants. We certainly don’t ask about hand size in our screeners, and apparently, it’s a challenge to get it right.

Another insight from Hammond’s talk was that testing 3D gestures introduces yet another opportunity for the study facilitator to bias the user: the very way you sit or move may prime the user to copy aspects of your body language in their gestures.

Multiuser Testing

Unlike mainstream user testing, game research often involves testing with many users in parallel — either because the game takes a long time to play or because it involves multiple players.

(On occasion we do test with multiple users at the same time even in traditional UX projects — for example when running usability studies with young children, but mostly we run one user at a time, because we want to pay close attention to every detail of the user’s behavior. Also, a website visit usually only lasts 2–3 minutes, with a typical page view lasting maybe 30 seconds, so we should aim to study everything in detail.)

Hardcore gamers will often play for hours at a stretch, with much of their time spent repeatedly shooting at something. As a result, playtesting labs around the world seem to be uniformly designed to accommodate 12–20 game testers (or more, for big companies) who play the same game, each at their own console.

Sebastian Long from Player Research in the UK described his company’s playtesting lab: The observation room included a big projection display with reduced versions of 12 users’ screens, as well as a pushbutton switch for observers to select one of the 12 screens to be magnified on a separate monitor for high-resolution observation when one of the testers did something interesting in the game. This need to alternate between surveying many peoples’ broad behavior and detailed attention to a single person’s specific interactions is rare outside games research.

The multiplayer component of many modern games is the second reason for multiuser sessions in game research. Whether several players play together in the same room or across the network in real time, researchers must understand their processes of communication and collaboration. In contrast, in mainstream UX, even when taking into account social media and omnichannel experiences, people rarely work together at the same time with the same interface to solve the same task.

Games researchers often have access to data at true scale: in the case of the R6S kill/death ratio I mentioned above, Olivier Guedon from Ubisoft measured the ratio across 440,000 games during alpha testing and 182M games in two beta-testing rounds. In the alpha, the defending team won 61% of the time, resulting to tweaks making it easier to attack. As a result, the attackers won 58% of the time in the first beta test. Further redesigns finally made the game balanced in the second beta. A great example of iterative design and the common observation that fixing one UX problem (too easy to defend) sometimes introduces a new problem (too easy to attack), which is why I recommend as many rounds of iteration as possible.

Professional Users

In the gaming domain, some companies have to accommodate two classes of users: normal users (who buy the game and play for fun) and professional users who are paid to play the game as an “eSport.” eSports are a big business with huge audiences watching the championship games. (In 2014, Amazon.com paid almost a billion dollars for one eSports site.)

Of course, one of the oldest lessons in traditional user experience is that we need to design for both novice and expert users. Each have different skill levels and need different features. (More on this in our UX Basic Training course — it’s that fundamental a concept.) But professional users take this distinction to an entirely different level and require separate research of what happens when operating a user interface becomes its own goal and the focus of somebody’s career.

Designing Fun

User satisfaction has always been one of the 5 main usability criteria: people will most definitely leave a website that’s too unpleasant. Even in enterprise software, you want users to like your design to reduce employee turnover. That said, mainstream UX research spends much time on other criteria, such as learnability and efficiency, because users are so goal oriented: they go to a website to get something done (say, buy something or read the news), not to have fun with the user interface.

In strong contrast, a game has no purpose other than fun. The stated goal may be to kill the boss. (No, not your manager, but a nasty gremlin or alien invader — these game enemies are referred to as bosses.) But the real goal is to have fun while doing so. That’s why it’s important to study the kill/death ratio: if designers made the game interface too good at killing bosses, that would be efficient, but not fun. (Good traditional UX; bad GUX.) Gamers need just the right level of challenge, because it’s also no fun if you die immediately and don’t get to off some bosses.

In an attempt to pinpoint exactly when users are excited or bored, some GUR researchers employ esoteric biometrics sensors. For example, they measure skin-conductance levels (sweat activity), which is related to physiological arousal. Pierre Chalfoun gave a good overview of biometrics at Ubisoft, and he emphasized that these physiological sensors are not always directly connected to user emotions, which is what we really want to design for. (The goal is engaged users, not sweaty users, even if there is a correlation.)

Chalfoun presented an interesting study of game tutorials, which showed that users’ levels of frustration, as indirectly measured by biometrics, mounted every time they failed to understand a game tutorial. First failure: somewhat frustrated. Third failure in a row: very frustrated. While this finding makes intuitive sense and may not be worth the cost of a biometrics lab, Chalfoun stressed that good visualizations of such data convince management and developers to take research seriously and invest in fixing the bad designs that caused such growing user frustration. (Without quantifiable data, it’s easier to dismiss user frustration as a minor matter that can’t hold up the release schedule.)

More Tech

Across the conference presentations, it was striking how many GUX teams make use of custom-written software. Anything from running the playtest lab to game telemetry (“calling home” with data about live play in a beta test) requires the company to allocate software developers to build special features just for the researchers.

I think there are two reasons that GUX teams seem to be more tech heavy than mainstream UX teams:

• The game researchers are embedded in highly geeky companies with legions of programmers, and it’s their company culture that if you need something, you go build it.
• The many game genres are widely diverging in needs, and thus require custom software to study seriously. In contrast, all websites are all built on top of the browser and require the same types of interactions. This means that it’s actually possible for third-party solutions to offer, say, cloud-based analytics tools that collect most data needed to study a website, thus eliminating the need for custom software.

Age and Gender Differences

The best (but very data-dense) presentation at GamesUR was by Nick Yee from Quantic Foundry. Yee has collected data from 220,000 gamers who completed a survey about what motivates them to play computer games. Motivations clustered into 6 groups: action, social, mastery, achievement, immersion, and creativity. Obviously, different games speak to different motivations: a death-march game will attract gamers motivated by action and social play, whereas a simulation game would be preferred by people interested in immersion and creativity.

One of the main components of the social cluster is competition. In this cluster gamers care about beating other players and being acknowledged as a high-ranking player (even if they don’t take it to the eSports extreme). The following chart shows the average score on the competition metric for men and women at different ages:

Average gamer scores, expressed as standard deviations from the overall mean across all ages and genders. High scores indicate people who are more motivated by competition. Source: Quantic Foundry, reprinted by permission.

Two observations from the chart:

• Men are more competitive than women. (Or, more precisely, men like competitive games more than women do.) Maybe not a big surprise.
• Competitiveness decreases drastically by age. In fact, the difference between young and old gamers is more than twice the difference between men and women, and by age 50 there’s no real difference between men and women anymore. (Older women might even be more competitive than older men, but there’s too little data in this research to say for sure.)

We sometimes find differences between young and old users in mainstream UX research, but our effect sizes are usually much more modest than those in the Gamer Motivation Study: as users age, task performance using websites declines by 0.8% per year. And it’s almost unheard of to see any reportable differences between male and female users. Say you want to study menu design: the difference between how men and women use any given menu is so negligible that is has zero practical meaning compared to the difference between a design that complies with menu UX guidelines and a poorly designed menu.

In conclusion, the Games User Research Summit was a great conference with many insightful talks by top professionals. Both they and we probably think that mainstream UX and GUR are more different than they really are, but all of us should periodically reflect on the notable similarities between the two fields to make sure that we don’t unduly limit our methods to those traditionally employed in our UX niche. For sure, as persuasive web design becomes increasingly important, mainstream user researchers will need to adopt (and adapt) methods from games user research.

Written by: Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen-Norman Group
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Games User Research: What’s Different? appeared first on Situated Research.

Virtual reality has traditionally been about transporting you to new worlds and making you believe you’re really there. It’s the immersion element, known as “presence” in industry lingo, that makes VR feel like magic. So it was refreshing to see Dragon Front, a new VR game in development for the Oculus Rift, take the approach in an entirely different direction. 

The game is a riff on popular collectible card games like Blizzard’s Hearthstone where you battle another opponent in strategic combat using playing cards you draw from a virtual deck. What sets Dragon Front apart is its battlefield. Because it was designed from the ground up for VR, the game wraps you in a 360-degree environment where every card you play turns into a real battle animation or spawns a virtual fighter to defend your fortress. The more dedicated CCG players may be reminded of the holographic Dual Disk tech from the Yu-Gi-Oh series that brought to life monsters in a virtual arena.

Dragon Front‘s approach is unique for VR because developer High Voltage is not trying to trick your brain into thinking what it’s seeing is real. Instead of making you feel like you’re right there on the battlefield, Dragon Front is about trying to replicate the experience of being in a room with a friend over a real-life table-top game. VR in this case is being used to replicate something familiar instead of conjuring up an entirely new sensation. So think of wearing the Oculus Rift as a way to bring to life the kind of technology you’ve seen in, say, the holographic chess game aboard the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. We may not be able to bring imaginary creatures and fantasy battlefields to life on our kitchen table quite yet, but we can certainly come close to that feeling by using VR today.

Dragon Front doesn’t have a release date set, but the game is already fully fleshed out from its beginnings as a physical card game developed on paper. Using the new Oculus Remote, a streamlined handheld input device shipping with the Rift headset in March, you’re able to look around the battlefield and select objects with the press of a button. Because there’s really just a small handful of inputs, you don’t need a full Xbox One controller to make moves.

After just 10 minutes or so of tutorial playing, I was able to grasp the game’s lengthy turn-based combat and try my hand at a real one-on-one fight with another human being in VR. For a card game, Dragon Front was an exhilarating experience that mixes the tense moments of high-level strategy play with the full-body escapism of VR. Yet after a few turns going back and forth, you start to completely forget that you’re even playing a game with a headset on. The competition starts to feel as natural as a physical table-top experience, while the Rift just becomes an interface for your virtual showdown.

Dragon Front has a couple fun quirks to amplify that sensation. For one, your opponent’s face shows up as a omnipresent floating mask above their fortress, and it will mirror the direction of their gaze and facial expressions in real time so you can feel as if you’re sitting across the table from the person. Dragon Front also relies on in-game voice chat so you can talk to your opponent as the game progresses.

So Dragon Front may not be the most immersive VR title out there or one you could show your parents to convince them of the technology’s potential. But it’s certainly a unique rethinking of the VR approach, one that will most certainly catch on as headsets like the Rift start becoming a more common way to play a wide variety of games and not just first-person experiences.

Written by: Nick Statt, the Verge (via Presence; images from High Voltage)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Dragon Front Is a Hearthstone-Like Card Game Built for Virtual Reality appeared first on Situated Research.