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.

Uber did not allow you to pre-book a taxi. Amazon started out by selling books only. Google was just a search engine. McDonald’s got rid of cutlery. And somehow we still believe that for a product to be successful it must do many things.

There are usually two cases — new products trying to convince the market that they are worth it and companies with established products that offer more than needed.

A big mistake new companies do is trying to offer everything their competitors have, believing this way they will attract more interest and gain customers. And on the other side, established companies which believe that more products and resources spent will always result in better results. So I would like to show you why offering too much is a psychological problem and how new products can nail it by focusing on one thing they are good at.

For new products you have to change behaviour first

As we might know, humans are creatures of habits. And if we already have well-established patterns, and most of the times we do, it will be hard for a new company to convince us that we must buy their “innovative product” or make a switch to something else.

We can call a product “innovation” when it changes people’s habits. For example, the iPhone is an innovation. So for your product to become a habit, it has to do a straightforward thing but do it great. Why? Because it is much easier to adopt a new technology if the learning curve is low and the reward is high for what it does.

The temptation is always there for manufacturers to add functionality to things — since conventional logic suggests that more must be better. What takes real genius is to leave things out — Rory Sutherland

Back in 2006, McDonald’s saw its growth stall. The fast-food chain decided that the problem was its limited menu, so it tried out many new items and ended up doubling the offerings. But sales hardly budged. Finally, in 2016, it took a new track. It went back to basics, dropped most of those additional items, and instead extended its popular breakfast offerings. Sales finally jumped, with same-store revenue up 6% in 2017, and the stock rose by 40% — Tiffani Bova, HBR

The learning curve must be low

To change a behaviour, it easier done if the learning curve of your product is low. As I wrote in a previous article — 10 Small Design Mistakes We Still Make — if we find something that does the job, and does it great, we will almost never make a switch to another service or product, even if it is a little bit better. Why? It’s in our nature to stay with the familiar and we don’t like taking risks of learning something only to realise it is not something we needed.

Once a person nails down the use of your product, they will rarely switch to something else.

How to make the learning curve lower? User metaphors.

People learn faster when an app’s interface and actions are metaphors for familiar experiences. The experiences may come from the digital or real world. Metaphors work well in because people interact with the screen. They move views out of the way to expose content beneath. They drag and swipe content. People toggle switches, move sliders, and scroll through picker values.

Always try to learn what other apps are your core customers using on a daily basis. This will allow to design similar experiences and remove any friction or create uncomfortable learning situations.

Choice overload

Another reason why many products fail or companies can’t get new users is because they offer too many options — features, services or products. And by overwhelming your users with too much stuff, people will always choose to stick with what works currently for them or choose not to buy anything else. This process is called overchoice or choice overload.

Choice overload is a cognitive process in which people have a difficult time making a decision when faced with many options — Wikipedia

The phenomenon of overchoice occurs when many similar choices are available. Making a decision becomes overwhelming due to the many potential outcomes and risks that may result from making the wrong choice. Having too many approximately equally good options is mentally draining because each option must be weighed against alternatives to select the best one. This can be easily seen and experienced when you buy, literally, anything for your house (dishwasher, microwave, washing machine, vacuum, etc.)

When Nike called Apple

You can fit all Apple’s products on a table, and it still surpassed Google as the most valuable company on the planet. How is that possible? They had a well-established philosophy that almost never changed — get rid of crappy stuff. Moreover, that philosophy helped Nike to become one of the greatest brands alongside Apple too. When Mark Parker became the CEO of Nike, he had a phone call with Steve Jobs and asked him:

“Do you have any advice?” Parker asked Jobs. “Well, just one thing,” said Jobs. “Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.” Jobs paused and Parker filled the quiet with a chuckle. But Jobs didn’t laugh. He was serious. “He was absolutely right,” said Parker. “We had to edit.” — Source: Forbes

How Apple does it

Apple doesn’t invent a new product or product category. Almost all the time, all of Apple’s products have been recreations of existing products. Apple did not invent the MP3 player (Walkman), the smartphone (Ericsson R380), the tablet (Microsoft). Instead, Apple reinvented all of them and made them better.

Our goals are very simple — to design and make better products. If we can’t make something that is better, we won’t do it — Jonathan Ive, Chief Design Officer of Apple

When you do one thing but great, you add an extra drop of confidence and loyalty into your customer’s heart. This way, when you launch every year a better product, it becomes harder for the customer to make a switch because you earned their trust in doing one but a great thing.

Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life― Jim Collins

Minimise the decision-making process

Another reason why Apple is so successful is that it has only one product in its category. It minimises the decision-making process for the consumer by making things simple.

Apple doesn’t have five iPhone models to choose from. It has only one — this year’s latest version. What about additional choice? Very simple — big or small. In case you don’t have the budget you can always buy the previous models with the same thinking model. And while this may seem to limit the company’s potential, given the number of smartphones available on the market, the truth is the reverse.

Time’s magazine did a consumer research for over 30 years, in which consumers constantly tell them that while choice is nice, in reality, people want the process of choosing a tech product to be simple and not complicated.

How Walkman did it

Akio Morita, with his business partner Masaru Ibuka, founded Sony in 1946. Large magnetic tape recorders were the company’s first area of focus, later followed by the first pocket radio. But perhaps his most significant moment of genius involved the creation of the Sony Walkman, the ancestor of the iPod.

In market research, the Walkman aroused very little interest and quite a lot of hostility. ‘Why would I want to walk about with music playing in my head?’ was a typical response. Morita ignored this.

How was the idea of Walkman born?

The request for the Walkman had initially come from the 70-year-old Ibuka, the honorary chairman of Sony at that time. Ibuka wanted a small device that would allow him to listen to a full-length opera on his many flights between Tokyo and the US.

Morita asked Sony’s engineers to work on the idea, and they succeeded in achieving what he had briefed them to create — a miniature stereo cassette-player. But they also had managed to include a recording function in the Walkman. However, Morita told them to remove it.

Now, why would you remove a feature that costs an insignificant amount of resources and adds a trivial amount to the final price? Sony’s engineers recommended going with a microphone and recorder because it would add value to the final product. This also means more ways to use the Walkman for.

But Morita argued that a recorder would only confuse the end consumer. “For what is this device? Dictation? Should I record live music? Should I take interviews with it? Should I record my vinyl?”

By narrowing the perceived uses of the device, Sony ensured that the device could do only one thing: listen to music. This way it would be easier for people to adopt a new behaviour, since there was only one thing to adopt. This way you can also understand why the iPods became so popular too.

How others do it

On the other side, giving examples of big brands like Apple, Sony and McDonald’s is easy when they are already prominent and successful, but there are also small companies that started with one feature only and are doing great. A company I admire, Bonsai — a tool for freelancers to send proposals & invoices, contracts, track expenses and projects — is a perfect example.

How did the company start? When they launched for the first time on Product Hunt I remember only one thing they promised — send beautiful and bullet proof contracts. Because of that, many people were attracted to the product. Not too many companies offered the ability to send designer like contracts. Also, it was a core problem that most freelancers were and are struggling with.

So what about them now? With time and patience they have become an all in one solution for freelancers. Starting small and perfecting a feature allowed this company to grow into what they are now today. And you can see that it was easy for early adopters to use the tool because the learning curve was low — only one feature. And once people got used to the product, it became easier to adopt other features too and make the switch entirely.

The philosophy of simplicity

This philosophy of keeping it simple is applied not only to a product’s features, or how many products your company sells. This type of thinking applies to everything. From the way you do business to they way you think. It’s not that you decide one day to cut down useless features of your product to only one and suddenly the sales will skyrocket. To achieve that type of simplicity, you have to know what is or are the biggest needs of your customers and not deviate from your goal with useless noise.

Growth is best achieved by making things simpler for your customer rather than for you — Tiffani Bova

Written by: Eugen Eşanu (via Medium)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Why Great Products Do Only One Thing 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.

Most clients and projects require the design researchers to state a predetermined sample size of users. Researchers often find it hard to justify to clients and business stakeholders on the choice of their sample size of users. Suggesting a very small sample size may make the client think that the research recommendations might not be impactful enough whereas, a very large sample size inflates the time and budget for the study. One of the many reasons for this conundrum may be that design research is often confused with market research and hence often assessed with the standards of market research. This report by Human Factors International superbly explains how they are different.

Well, theoretically a design research study can involve a minimum of 3 users to around 100+ users. Undoubtedly, the quality of insights drawn from such a range of users might differ nevertheless there is a combination of factors I believe one should consider when ascertaining the number of users. Let’s have a look at these factors in detail.

The Scope of the Design Study

The most important factor to consider is to determine what are we trying to accomplish through the study. The scope of the study can be:

a. To design a product from scratch and doing exploratory design research

When the focus is on discovering needs and opportunities for a product then, we need to maximize the number of users. This is because exploratory studies require to examine the entire spectrum of the target audience who might be existing or potential users of the product and also all possible behaviors, processes and interactions of these users with their operable environment which can lead to the creation of a new experience. Creating new experiences is like a gamble researchers and designers are taking. One can never be 100% assured that it’s going to work. Hence, the more the number of users, the better will be the statistical evidence to support the design hypotheses and ensure that the new experience is indeed a delightful one. However, the limiting factor of budget and time for the study can again constrain and influence the number of users for the study which I have covered later in the article.

b. To find solutions to problems of an already existing product and doing validatory research, eg. usability testing, identifying new features etc.

When we are finding potential solutions to difficulties with current design system then, we can go with a fewer number of participants. When probing for usability problems with an interface, sometimes the magic number of 5 users can do the trick as explained by this NN group article. However, when probing for new feature capabilities or studying the current state of the system then, sometimes one may need more than 5 users. In such cases, the decisions boil down to considering other factors such as characteristics of the study population, resources for the study, etc which I have discussed below..

Characteristics of the Study Population

It is uncommon to have just one kind of users of a product. Moreover, it is quite possible that the user groups may not be predefined and the research may further explore the various user categories in the study population. It is also possible that the target population might comprise users from various countries, cultures and even speaking many languages. Therefore, the more diversified a study population we are examining, the more the number of users will be required to get a comprehensive picture through the study. In other words, we will need multiple user representatives for each persona group or user type we are designing for. I recommend beginning with a minimum of three users to consider for each user type and then increase the number of users uniformly for each category depending on product and domain complexity.

Resources at Disposal

In reality, budget and time always dictate the sample size for research. In addition to conducting a research study, a researcher needs to budget time for recruiting users, analysing the data and further feeding the insights to design sprints. Hence, discerning the right number of users in perspective with time and budget of study is critical to ensuring complete project handling.

Considering the worst case scenario where the project permits very less budget and very less time, I would recommend to scale down the number of participants to get the data on time. This is to make sure that we are able to generate at least the most significant insights.

In cases, where there is ample time but less budget, we can always select research methods which are frugal enough to generate meaningful insights without compromising on the number of users being considered for study eg. methods such as design surveys, diary studies etc.

For the reverse case of less time and a substantial budget, we need to consider differentiating between exploratory and validictory research and further ascertain the number of users. This is because recruiting more users will not be a problem here, however being able to recruit more users in less time will definitely be.

Quantitative vs Qualitative studies

Out of all the factors which impact the number of users in a study, the choice of doing a quantitative study or qualitative study is the one 90% of the times in the hands of the researcher. This is because the purpose of research and the quality and type of insights which are expected from the study are most clear to the researcher. Rest all the factors are conditional and largely statutory to the project requirements. Thus, the researcher has the liberty of determining the number of users to fit its requirements. However, the only constraint to be careful here is findings from quantitative studies need to be statistically sound. Statistically sound quantitative studies set a requirement of a minimum number of users which is usually large (often 30 users or more). Whereas, findings from qualitative studies are behavioral estimates. Thus, the researcher has the freedom to decide the number of users which is further elaborated by this article.

To conclude

Small, medium or large — what sample size of users fits your study is a composite question. The magic number of 5 users may work magic in some studies while in some it may not. It depends on the constraints put on by project requirements, assumptions about problem discoverability and implications to the design process. Assess these factors to determine the number of users for your study:

1. What’s the nature and scope of research — is it exploratory or validatory?
2. Who and what kind of users are you planning to study?
3. What’s the budget and time to finish the study?
4. Does your research involve presenting statistically significant numbers or inferring behavioural estimates for the problem statement?

Happy User Recruiting!

Written by: Shrut Kirti (via Medium)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post User Research: is more the merrier? appeared first on Situated Research.

In this article I will explain what that rule is, and what it means to product and service design. I’ll also raise the possible implications of this phenomenon on organizational management, collaboration, and general performance. The psychological phenomenon I will be discussing in this article is known as Miller’s Law. Rather than just tell you what Miller’s Law is, I ask you to take part in this exercise for a more immersive learning lesson.

The Exercise…

Step 1

Read the italicized instructions before starting. Grab a pen and paper. This is an exercise where you will try to recall words you’ve just read, off memory.

Below is a list of 20 words. Read them to comprehension , and try to memorize as many as possible. Try to keep the words ‘in your head’. Do not write the words. Spend about a minute. After you are done reading, scroll down until you see the word ‘STOP’. Then, read step 2.

STOP < ··············································

Step 2

Now, use your pen and paper to write down as many words as you can remember from the list. Think hard, but do not scroll back up to view the words. If you scroll up, the experiment is ruined. Give yourself about half a minute…Once you have finished writing the words you tried to recall, scroll back up and check how many you got right.

If you are like the vast majority of human beings, you will have remembered 5–9 of the words. Hundreds of experiments prove universality of this limitation on memory. When I first discovered this phenomenon, I knew it had huge implications on product design, because of the degree to which this limitation affects day to day tasks. This capacity for keeping ~7 bits of information ‘in the head’ short term, is known as Miller’s Law.

Miller’s Law · The Magic Number

In 1956 there was a paper written that became one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. Titled, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information, it was published in 1956 by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Princeton University’s Department of Psychology in Psychological Review. The crux of the paper suggests that the number of perceptual ‘chunks’ an average human can hold in working memory (a component of short-term memory) is 7 ± 2. This is frequently referred to as Miller’s law. Here is a summary of the article, sourced from wikipedia:

In his article, Miller discussed a coincidence between the limits of one-dimensional absolute judgment and the limits of short-term memory. In a one-dimensional absolute-judgment task, a person is presented with a number of stimuli that vary on one dimension (e.g., 10 different tones varying only in pitch) and responds to each stimulus with a corresponding response (learned before). Performance is nearly perfect up to five or six different stimuli but declines as the number of different stimuli is increased. The task can be described as one of information transmission: The input consists of one out of n possible stimuli, and the output consists of one out of n responses. The information contained in the input can be determined by the number of binary decisions that need to be made to arrive at the selected stimulus, and the same holds for the response. Therefore, people’s maximum performance on one-dimensional absolute judgement can be characterized as an information channel capacity with approximately 2 to 3 bits of information, which corresponds to the ability to distinguish between four and eight alternatives.

Moreover, the human mind can remember ~7 bits of information when completing a task that requires cognitive effort. This is critical, because humans are constantly performing tasks, and trying to juggle various stimuli in the mind when doing so. One of the key concepts behind Miller’s Law is ‘chunking’, which basically means assembling various bits of information into a cohesive gestalt. For example, the word · p e n c i l · is actually a ‘chunk’ of letters, organized into a perceptual gestalt. If the letters were rearranged · c n l i p e · it would be six separate chunks of information. Chunking is a critical element of information organization, and is the basis for our UX and organizational rule.

The Rule

Always organize elements of information in categories no larger than 9, but preferably ~5 chunks.

The more chunks of information you add to an ‘interface’, the more difficult it becomes to ‘work’, using the information at hand. This is especially critical for first time users, because they haven’t had the ‘practice’ needed to encode the interface into long term memory, or, for the behaviour to become habitual. I constantly see this rule being broken by giants like Facebook, Google, and WordPress. Don’t even get me started on automobile interface design. The ~5 bit chunk rule also compliments minimalism as a rigorous design philosophy. To expound, due to the limitations of working memory, as a product becomes more feature-full it inevitably becomes more difficult to use, because the user has to manage more information while operating the product. This makes good information design so critical.

Millers Law also highlights the importance of foresight and proper planning in the design process, because as you add more features to a product — your interface must be able to accommodate those new features without breaking the visual foundation of what you built. Rebuilding a foundation takes immense time and resources.

Another perceptual phenomenon observed in relation to Miller’s Law is known as the primacy, and recency effect. These terms are used respectively to describe how we remember items sensed at the beginning and end of an experience, more than ones in the middle. For example, if I were to show you a list of words, you would more likely remember the words at the beginning of the list, and the end. This is also known as the serial position effect. From wikipedia:

Serial position effect is the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst. [1] The term was coined by Hermann Ebbinghaus through studies he performed on himself, and refers to the finding that recall accuracy varies as a function of an item’s position within a study list. [2] When asked to recall a list of items in any order (free recall), people tend to begin recall with the end of the list, recalling those items best (the recency effect). Among earlier list items, the first few items are recalled more frequently than the middle items (the primacy effect). [3][4]

This observation raises huge questions in business and design. If people remember more at the beginning and end of an experience, how do we enhance the positives, and mitigate the negatives at these respective times? When does an experience truly begin and end? Should we be organizing more important elements at the beginning and end of lists due to their increased retention? These are all valid questions that UX designers and executives should ask when inventing or developing their product.

Millers Law can be applied to any aspect of your life that involves performing a mildly complex task. By reducing the amount of elements in your reach/access — and keeping them organized by relevant chunks not exceeding 9 bits, your brain will be able to remember exactly where things are so you can access its functionality. When lists of items grow too large, they become very difficult to mentally map them, requiring the user to do more cumbersome searching.

The adherence to Miller’s Law is especially relevant in the light of lean methodologies and recent trends in tech and UX. Users want and need a trial before they purchase something — it’s that simple. If they don’t experience the value within the first day or week of using it — they won’t buy. Since new users do not have lengthly time to learn where everything is — information design needs to be planned and well thought out before development happens.

Millers Law Beyond Information

We live in a world with an exponentially increasing amount of information. By not organizing it properly, or eliminating some completely, it ultimately degrades our ability to complete critical tasks for the purposes of survival (navigation/gaining income). That is why it’s so useful to omit items, products, and services from your life that aren’t giving a quality return on investment. This falls in line with the Pareto principle, the idea that 80% of your outcomes comes from 20% of your investments. Are you juggling too many tasks per day to be efficient? Is your team using too many tools to collaborate? Do you have too many members on your team? Are you overloading your new employees with information, leading to confusion?

Millers law teaches us that humans have a finite amount of information they can process, and that information overload will lead to distraction that negatively affects performance. Companies should look for ways to organize information in a way that is much more digestible for their customers and employees. This could be by eliminating tools or applications that are producing cognitive overload, reducing the amount of members on a team, or even organizing your departments based on our knowledge of working memory.

This is especially true in new science of the concept of flow, made famous bypsychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is a word Mihaly coined to describe a state of concentration or ‘absorption’ with a specific task that humans ultimately find rewarding, pleasurable, and fulfilling. He describes it as an optimal state where we perform at our best and truly live ‘in the moment’. One sure way to kill flow is by increasing distractions in the workplace. So, do you think that by giving your employees more tools, that it actually enhances performance? Miller’s Law teaches us time and time again this is not the case. When it comes to completing tasks, less is more.

Actionable Insights

Turn off your desktop slack notifications. Get rid of the things you never use. Stop checking your various inboxes. Master one tool, not many. Now start focusing.

Written by: Jeff Davidson (via Prototypr)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post The Most Important Rule in UX Design that Everyone Breaks appeared first on Situated Research.

To help you understand the perception of the user, I will introduce some design principles which I think are the most important, and also provide common examples of these principles in practice. Let’s start with the Von Restorff effect:

Von Restorff effect

The Von Restorff effect (also known as the isolation effect) predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered!

Does this ring any bells?

This is the main reason why all call-to-actions (CTAs) look different from the rest of the action buttons on a site or application!

Von Restorff Effect Example

We want users to be able to differentiate between a simple action button and a CTA, in order for them to have a clear understanding what the CTA does, whilst also remembering it throughout their use of the application or site.

“When multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered!”

Serial position effect

The Serial Position Effect is the propensity of a user to best remember the first and last items in a series.

From left to right, Twitter, Medium, ProductHunt

This is why most applications nowadays ditch the hamburger menu and go for a bottom or top bar navigation, placing the most important user actions to the right or left. In the image above, you can see some examples from popular iOS applications. Each put the “Home” and “Profile” items all the way to the left and right, with serial position effect in mind.

Cognitive load

Cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in a person’s working memory. To put it simply, it is the amount of thought you need to exercise in order to complete a specific task.

“Cognitive load is the amount of thought you need to exercise in order to complete a specific task.”

Cognitive load theory can be differentiated into three types:

1. Intrinsic cognitive load
2. Extraneous cognitive load
3. Germane cognitive load

I will touch upon the Intrinsic and Germane types as I think that these are the most applicable to UX design.

Intrinsic Cognitive Load

Intrinsic cognitive load is the difficulty associated with a specific instructional topic. It’s the main reason micro-copy and copy play a huge role in a good user experience.

For example most of the time on applications’ empty states, we prompt users to complete a task. Here, the copy needs to be short, simple and with the appropriate words in order for the user to be able to easily follow the instructions.

From left to right, Stayful, Serist, Lucidchart

Germane Cognitive Load

Germane cognitive load is the cognitive load devoted to processing information and construction of schemas. The schemas describe a pattern of thought that organises categories of information and any relationships among them.

One of the reasons we use design patterns is because they’re something we’re programmed to do by default – so it’s easier for the users to recognise and learn something new if they can discern it into a pattern from something they already understand.

“It’s easier for users to learn something new if they can discern it to a pattern from something they understand”

Hick’s Law

Hick’s Law is the most popular principle, along with the Gestalt Laws.

It’s also very simple to understand and practice. Hick’s Law describes that the time it takes for a person to make a decision depends on the choices available to him or her. So if the number of choices increases, the time to make a decision increases logarithmically.

A very nice example of Hick’s Law that applies to user experience design are lists:

Hick’s Law Example

Law of Proximity

Law of proximity is part of the Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization, and it states that objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together. To put it in simpler terms, our brain can easily associate objects close to each other, better than it does objects that are spaced far apart. This clustering occurs because humans have a natural tendency to organise and group things together.

Law of Proximity Example

“The Law of Proximity states that objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together”

In the example above, there are 72 circles. We recognise the circles in groups, based on the distance between them. Categorically, we also perceive that there’s a group of 36 circles on the left side of the image, and 3 groups of 12 circles on the right side of the image.

I believe this example makes it clear that there is a need to group things together when designing a UI, as well as the importance of being careful when putting things together since users may naturally think they are associated with each other.

Written by: Thanasis Rigopoulos (via Marvel)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post The Psychology Principles Every UI/UX Designer Needs to Know appeared first on Situated Research.

Card sorting will help you to understand your users’ expectations and their mental image of your product’s use.

Card sorting allows you insight into your users’ thought processes allowing you to see why they organize content in certain ways. This is key for organizing your content and developing an intuitive structure for your product.

In-Depth Site Analysis

Card sorting exercises can help structure a website’s information, including site labels and navigation schemes. This boosts usability by making things easy to find.

Smart Design

By creating intuitive, mutually exclusive categories, your final product will be easier to use and more appealing to users with good labeling and navigation.

Work Through Discrepancies

Often, information can be organized in multiple ways. Card sorting will determine the best content structure with consensus on the most logical grouping of information.

We have helped clients early in their design process using card sorting sessions, where users are separately given cards with labels, then asked to organize them and assign category names.

Card sorting has many benefits: to learn more or get started, contact us today.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt, VP, Situated Research

The post What is Card Sorting? appeared first on Situated Research.

Our team has come up with ten usability guidelines for web developers and business owners to follow. This list is a starting point to providing the user experience that you want to give your customers online. Remember, if users come to your website and have trouble finding information or ordering a product, they will leave your website and in turn you will lose business.

Website Usability Tip #1: Visibility

Always show users where they are at on the website. 

• Use breadcrumbs
• Highlight where the user is at in the menu navigation
• Use sitemaps

Website Usability Tip #2: Communicate Clearly

The website should speak the user’s language. Nothing should be left up for interpretation. 

• Links and buttons should be concise and clear
• Labeling should make sense to the user
• Labeling should also be short and to the point
• ‘Error 404’ pages mean nothing to most users
• Buttons should be labeled in a way to bring a call to action (buy now)

Website Usability Tip #3: User Error

Users often click on items by mistake and need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted area without having to go through an extended process. 

• Use clear breadcrumbs
• Use sitemaps
• Have a search button
• Make sure your logo is clickable to take the user back to the home page
• In some instances pop boxes may be useful warning your users of their error

Website Usability Tip #4: Consistency

Consistency is key to keep your users happy and coming back for more. Users should not have to reorient themselves each time they click on a page.

• Keep the same format for all pages of your website
• Placement of menu navigation should remain consistent from page to page
• Heading font sizes and placement should be consistent
• Labeling should not change
• Functionality of buttons, forms, etc. should not change

Website Usability Tip #5: Error Prevention

Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place.

• Eliminate error-prone conditions
• Check for errors
• Present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action
• Design a simple environment

Check back next week for the remaining 5 usability tips. In the meantime, if you would like our team to review your website you can request a free website analysis video to get a professional free analysis of your website, emailed to you in the form of a short video.

We look forward to helping you create the ultimate user experience.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Tips on Improving Your Website’s User Experience, Part 1 appeared first on Situated Research.

In this post and the next, you will learn 10 tips for designing dashboards and application interfaces that are stylish and user-friendly while still presenting important data to your users in a format that they can understand. Whether you are just starting UI design or your product is almost finished, jump in and learn how to design the perfect dashboard.

#1: Ask Your Audience

What do your users care about? Developers frequently make mistakes in determining what their applications will be used for, in turn focusing on metrics that aren’t as important as they think they are.

Instead of guessing about what your users will find important, poll them to find out directly. Facebook used this strategy to understand the needs of its advertisers and released a UI update as a result. They understood that understanding their end user was important and that they should have conducted research before their initial launch.

#2: Design for Different Platforms

How will your users interact with your application? Will they view it on their iPad, on a full resolution PC, or on their smartphone? Knowing the platform which your users prefer is key to building a powerful and usable interface.

While every modern website should be responsive it is important to design your application with your most widely used platform in mind. Things like large buttons, for example, are crucial for tablet apps.

Use Google Analytics to see which devices are used to access your website, and then design for your most popular platform.

#3: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

There are certain features of UI design that are common between websites. Almost every social network, for example, has a feed of recent updates. Almost every B2B application has a left-aligned navigation bar and a right-aligned content section.

Instead of designing your dashboard from the ground up, use features common to your type of application to speed up the design process. Dropdown notifications or top-right corner account menus are ubiquitous and well-known in UI design.

#4: Color Psychology is Important

Colors play a fundamental role in design, particularly in the design of great user interfaces. Use colors to alert and notify users to tasks, activities, features, and more in the form of button colors and alerts.

Generally, it’s best to use predictable and common colors within your design. Green is a great indicator that everything is okay, while orange and red can be used to indicate a small or serious problem.

#5: Keep the Design Simple

When in doubt, simplify. The best user interfaces are not massively complex – in fact, the best UIs are not complex at all. With the right approach to usability, you can put a huge amount of functionality behind a simple, user-friendly dashboard design.

Break your product’s functions down into core categories, then use these categories to determine your interface’s design.

If your product has hundreds of features, categorize them and create a tabbed or modular layout for users to select features from. Simplicity works, and it’s always best to select clean, simple design over something cluttered but powerful.

We hope that this post helped to give you a good start to creating an awesome dashboard. We will post the last five tips later on this week. In the mean time if you would like to learn more about our company or the services that we offer, visit our website at www.situatedresearch.com. We would love to help you out with your next big design.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Tips on Creating an Awesome Dashboard User Experience 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.