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 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.

This helps you stay on the winning side by assessing your branding, usability, accessibility, information architecture, or any other element of your web content strategy.

By examining your competitors’ websites, you can gauge what you do best and what they do best: creating key objectives that you can improve upon.

Over 3,000 companies have had their website analyzed by Situated Research to see how they measure up against their competition.

Detailed Web Analysis

We’ll trace your business objectives through your website to see what services you offer and how effectively you communicate. We’ll look at your site’s navigation structure, color psychology, and social media initiatives.

Assess Competitors

Find out how effectively your industry competitors attract new customers, and how their website’s overall experience stacks up against yours. Typically two or three top competitors can reveal insights into how you can better target clients.

Key Findings Report

A summary will show specific areas that you lead your competitors, and where they lead you. Key findings will allow your design team to maximize the effectiveness of your website and attract more customers.

Your website is an investment. Effective marketing will attract more clients, giving your business the boost it needs. Spy on your competition to grow your market share and maximize the ROI of your website.

To learn more about competitive website assessments and how you can get yours today, visit our website: https://www.situatedresearch.com/services/competitive-website-assessment/

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt, VP Situated Research

The post Want An Easy Way to Spy on Your Competition? appeared first on Situated Research.

Eye tracking visualizations such as gaze plots, heat maps and gaze replays can easily be interpreted and presented in a convincing way. We have helped companies figure out where their users’ attention is drawn, and derive value by learning what marketing materials are most effective at presenting information.

Track Gaze

Eye tracking uses a non-invasive camera to watch users’ eyes as they ‘track’ information on a screen. We will help you determine where your users are looking, and why.

Heat Maps

Eye tracking sessions generate heat-map style overlays on your interface to show how long users look at a portion of the screen while completing tasks with your product.

Usability Findings

By tracking users’ gaze while they consume information,  you can determine what information is being overlooked, and what information users prefer.

The visual results of eye tracking studies and real-time data observations provide tremendous tools to get non-usability experts excited about and involved in usability testing.

To learn more about eye tracking to design effective interfaces visit our website at: https://www.situatedresearch.com/services/eye-tracking/

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt, VP of Situated Research

The post Designing Interfaces That Are Effective 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-depth research is one thing, but having actual tests to check the solidity of your design is just as important. Many people and companies shy away from the practice of usability testing, believing it involves a lot of resources and expenses. And while others understand that it doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming, they still don’t get it completely right and overcomplicate things—rendering their usability tests less useful than they could be.

In reality, the best results come from stringing together many smaller tests that include 5 users at a time.

When it comes to usability testing, 5 is the magic number.”

Why is usability testing important?

Because user experience is a such a large field and UX designers are charged with the giant task of building a pleasing “overall experience,” flaws are a natural and often unavoidable part of the design process.

Remember the HealthCare.gov launch? It was an info-dense hellstorm of a website that was consistently abandoned by frustrated users. Despite a well-designed, simple wireframe with clearly labeled information and a navigable structure, the deeper people got into the process of finding insurance, the more complicated their experience became.

The highlight of this failure was an overblown security process that took up to 60 minutes to complete, leaving users to scramble for alternatives. Situated Research found that “the early stages of application on HealthCare.gov look simple, and encourage users to begin an application; however, the reality is a long process with difficulties that waste users’ time and a delayed gratification of shopping for coverage.”

The more users you add to a test group, the less you’ll learn.”

Usability testing is the number-one tool for making sure these usability flaws don’t happen. Without proper usability testing, the result for HealthCare.gov led to nationwide difficulty in obtaining insurance through the public marketplace and boatloads of public bashing, but that all could have been easily avoided. Despite popular misconceptions about how cumbersome this process is, you really only need 5 test users per testing group to make sure your product offers a smooth experience.

What’s so magical about the number 5?

Given that the probability of a user encountering an error during testing is 31%, according to Jeff Sauro of MeasuringU, testing just 5 users would turn up 85% of the problems in an interface. This conclusion is brought to you by binomial probability, or what may be better known as the Poisson Distribution—which can show us the chances of achieving n successes in N trials. A Poisson Distribution with a 31% binomial probability shows that once you add more than 5 users to a test group, returns diminish drastically—the more users you add to a test group, the less you’ll learn.

If you have 3 test users, you’ll catch about 65% of the problems. With 4 users you’ll catch 75%, and with 5 you’ll catch 85%. Once you cross the threshold at 5 and begin to add more test users, the increase of issues that you’ll uncover reduces: With 6, you’ll catch 90% of the issues; with 8, you’ll catch 95%; and with 12, you’ll catch 99%.

These diminishing returns are due to the fact that user experiences overlap. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, “As soon as you collect data from a single test user, your insights shoot up and you have already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of the design… When you test the second user, you will discover that this person does some of the same things as the first user…

People are definitely different, so there will also be something new that the second user does that you didn’t observe with the first user…

The third user will do many things that you already observed… Plus, of course, the third user will generate a small amount of new data, even if not as much as the first and second user did.”

The amount of new data collected decreases with each test user and flattens out most prominently at 5 test users, making 5 users the right size for the right value.

Research difficulties

A word of caution: Don’t fetishize the numbers here by solely focusing on your test users’ quantitatively recorded feedback. The qualitative experience of your users is critical—your test users will struggle with a certain aspect of your website, and understanding why and working with them to brainstorm solutions is essential.

For example, perhaps your test users found the shift in color scheme from the homepage to the signup screen jarring? Instead of only receiving some vague quantification of the color scheme issues, you can prompt users to explain. The blue used for the navigation bar on the homepage is too similar to the blue on the signup screen’s continue button? That’s any easy fix.

At the same time, getting the most out of your 5 test users in a research session requires a specific skillset, so your demeanor and positioning in relation to the test user is key. No test user wants someone hovering over them, asking leading questions, and appearing hurt when criticism is voiced. Conduct yourself accordingly. No test user will respond candidly in an uncomfortable setting. Put test users at ease by opening with an informal chat, start the meeting by clearly explaining your goals, and continue to speak conversationally with curiosity as your main motivation. How did you feel about X? Why did Y make you feel Z?

With test users, speak conversationally with curiosity as your main motivation.”

The controversy

No one doubts the accuracy of the Poisson Distribution, but there’s some controversy surrounding the use of 31% as the average problem frequency. While 31% is a problem frequency that has been derived from many studies, only very new active websites and applications may be so vulnerable. More streamlined and polished products may, in fact, have a much lower problem frequency. For instance, let’s say one issue will only affect 5% of the population. According to binomial probability, this new frequency would change the number of users necessary to find the problem.

As a baseline, 5 is still the golden rule in UX usability testing.”

Of course, it’s impossible to know the probability of discovery for every potential problem. According to MeasuringU, “As a strategy, pick some percentage of problem occurrence, say 20%, and likelihood of discovery, say 85%, which would mean you’d need to plan on testing 9 users.

After testing 9 users, you’d know you’ve seen most of the problems that affect 20% or more of the users. If you need to be surer of the findings, then increase the likelihood of discovery, for example, to 95%. Doing so would increase your required sample size to 13.”

Image from Inside Design: OpenTable.

Any number of factors—the level of refinement of your website, the size of your user base, or likelihood of discovery for a problem—can change your magic number for usability testing drastically.

As a baseline, though, 5 is still the golden rule. Limit testing to 5 users and you’ll uncover the majority of problems that plague your website or app, while still keeping your costs low and the process simple.

Written by: Ellie Martin, Design Entrepreneur (via InVision blog)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Why 5 Is the Magic Number for UX Usability Testing appeared first on Situated Research.

First, usability testing is of critical importance for reducing the number of support calls from users. Poor usability is a major reason why users call software technical support lines, and every software industry executive knows how expensive product support can be. In addition, charging users for support increases their potential dissatisfaction with the product. If users find it easy to use your product, they will not need to call for technical support as often.

Second, incorporating usability tests is an important part of the development process to reduce training costs, especially for software produced for in-house use. A highly usable product is much easier for users to learn than others where usability was not a high priority. Users learn features more quickly, retain their knowledge longer, and are more productive: which directly correlates to decreased training costs and higher efficiency.

Third, usability testing improves user acceptance. Acceptance is the culmination of a number of factors, including usability, utility, and likability. For retail products, user acceptance often directly correlates to repeat buying and customer loyalty, which means users are more likely to recommend the product to others. For internal applications, user acceptance correlates to a willingness to use the software to perform the tasks for which it was designed, which helps increase productivity. Increasing usability is one of the factors that can contribute to increased user acceptance and satisfaction.

Why Wait?

Many clients contact us once their product is ready to be published. They start panicking because they didn’t conduct testing and want to get quick feedback before their product goes to market. There are many issues with waiting until the end of the design process to start usability testing; however, the largest is cost.

Software designers and project managers often worry that initiating a user-centered design process and performing proper usability testing will require unacceptable amounts of time and money. The reality is that the cost in time and money spent focusing on your users is often relatively small, and certainly when compared to the cost of not doing so. Research has shown that problems are exponentially more expensive to fix the later in the development process they are found: fixing a problem in the concept stage is much cheaper than fixing a problem late in design, which is much cheaper than fixing a problem once a product has launched.

Consider, for example, the cost in time and money of making design revisions late in the development cycle as opposed to earlier, when the product is still in the planning stage. If you wait until the beta period to expose users to the product for purposes of usability testing, you may find yourself dismantling parts of the program that took a lot of time to develop. And waiting until the product is actually released and then making changes based on negative feedback or supporting a poor design could make the cost immeasurably higher due to high product-support costs or poor reception by users.

A reasonable usability study usually can be performed in a short period of time, and can greatly reduce the time and cost of making changes late in the development cycle. The cost of performing testing will vary depending on the nature of your product and the parts of the interface that you would like to test. When executed properly, usability studies can fit well with a large variety of development methods, including iterative and agile design methods. Various usability tests can fit well on projects that require both quick feedback on particular design features, and longitudinal data that informs design throughout the development process.

You can think of usability testing just like you do code testing. Successful project managers account for testing and quality assurance when planning out a project. They don’t see it as something extra that must be tacked on to the project schedule and budget. Rather, project managers accept code testing as a cost of doing business because the alternative is much more expensive and results in an inferior product. The same applies to usability testing.

Usability can help differentiate your products from those of your competitors. If two products are substantially equal in utility, the product with higher usability will probably be regarded as superior.

Finally, remember that every product gets tested for usability—eventually. Users perform usability testing on your product every time they use it, and they render their verdict through their continued use or lack thereof. By testing the product before releasing it to market, you can help ensure that users’ experiences with the product will be positive.

To learn more about usability research and testing, check out our services or reach out to discuss your project.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt, Situated Research
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Why Hiring Usability Experts Can Save Your Bacon, and Bottom Line appeared first on Situated Research.

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.

The same is true for just about every presentation, whether in person or virtual, I give or audit. The projector, the presentation software, the microphone, the slide clicker, all conspire to make the experience rocky and unpleasant. All of them require that I know technical details that I really wish I didn’t, and didn’t have to know.

One of my colleagues asked me, after a frustrating session trying to get all of the digital bits and pieces to cooperate, why the complications never seem to go away. Here is my answer to that simple but profound question.

While it’s tempting to blame the vendors, the problem is broader than any one company’s failure. As proof, we’ve changed video conferencing vendors three times. We’ve upgraded our hardware. We’ve taken classes from the supplier. There is some principle at work here other than just simple bad quality or bad design.

The difficulty in making these systems work smoothly comes from their edges, not from their centers.

The people who create these systems are not — usually not — incompetent, nor evil. Their products undergo tests and quality assurance regimens. They are not blind to the notion that giving their users a bad experience is bad for their own self-interest. So why do these failures continue? Why is it that our experiences using these systems don’t seem to improve even with repeated use?

The difficulty in making these systems work smoothly comes from their edges, not from their centers. Each vendor builds a reliable and effective product, and through diligent testing assures that they meet high standards of performance. The only place where those standards fall is at the edges, where the maker is unsure of the requirements.

Reconciling the two disparate points of view is what the profession of interaction design is all about.

The edges are the interfaces with entities outside their control, outside their offices. Out there they are a little unsure of what they have to do and what forces affect them. Inside the company’s four walls they know exactly what they’re making, how it should behave, and what it should do. But for the entities outside those four walls, some measure of haziness creeps in, notably, the user.

A button on a user interface is well-designed if it makes these things clear to the user:

• Its physical location.
• Its function.
• Its purpose and current state.
• The consequences of its use.

Most contemporary, mainstream products are reasonably clear on these points. The difficulty arises when the function, purpose, state, and consequences of that button are not precisely the same as the user imagines them to be. Reconciling the two disparate points of view is what the profession of interaction design is all about. Interaction designers study the user and then design the placement, appearance, and function of the button so it is consistent with the user’s mental model of what is happening inside the program. Good design goes a long way towards reconciling the two sides; however, it can always be better.

Two successful systems fail as they interact.

Of course, the user is only one of the two big areas of interaction with external entities. The other, arguably bigger and more consequential area is the interaction with other systems, particularly hardware and software systems from other vendors.

When I use a sketching program on my computer, it runs as a standalone, sovereign application, and therefore using it is straightforward, if not easy. But when I use a video conferencing application on my computer, it has to talk to multiple correspondents on their various computers and browsers, each one with their different brands of microphones and web cameras, and then the image is sent to a projector, and the sound is sent to external speakers. Each different product by each different vendor has built into it just a small amount of uncertainty about the behavior of the other guy.

From the user’s point of view, that well-designed button loses a lot of its clarity. When all or part of that button’s function, purpose, state, or consequences take effect in another vendor’s product, there is every likelihood that the situation has neither been fully thought out nor verified in real-world conditions. When I push “Submit” on a website, I generally know what that means on that website, but I may have no idea what that means on a related or connected site.

Whose fault is it that the user is misled about the effects of their actions in a product other than the one the action is initiated in? Each product can say with all sincerity that, “It isn’t my fault.” Of course, while true, this assertion does not help the user. Better than assigning blame, we should ask whose responsibility it is.

It is clearly everyone’s responsibility, but as the old saying goes, “When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.” It’s too easy to claim that you thought someone else was going to take care of it. What’s more, the rules of business grant no value to such consideration. Modern business norms and accounting systems ensure that any time a cost can be externalized, it must be.

One of the reasons why Apple’s products are so well regarded is because they “just work,” and the main reason they do is because most of the supplementary products that run on or with Apple computers are made by Apple. Apple’s mouse division can, in fact, really know what the folks in Apple’s keyboard division are thinking, so their products don’t misconstrue each other’s behaviors or interfaces. There’s also a notion that what is good for the mouse division will also be good for the keyboard division.

Video conferencing and presentations are always fraught with technical minutiae simply because they always rely on making multiple products from multiple vendors in multiple product areas work together performing a complex task across great distances and on disparate platforms.

I have devised a simple formula for understanding this interface problem that I call the “Edge Calculus.”

I have devised a simple formula for understanding this interface problem that I call the “Edge Calculus.” From a single vendor, the total failure is the averageof the individual failures of the elements, or (x1+x2+…xn)/n. When there are elements from more than one vendor involved, the total failure is theproduct of the individual failures, or x1*x2*…xn.

For example, I’m typing this draft of my blogpost into Pages, Apple’s word processor, on an Apple computer. If we assign each product a success rate of 90%, the final result I experience as a user is 180/2 or 90%.

But when I use the video conferencing product GotoMeeting, from Citrix, on my Apple computer, the two 90% products multiply out to 81%, and my experience degrades. Further, when I use an external microphone from Samson, a Webcam from Microsoft, projected through a Samsung, I now have .9*.9*.9*.9*.9 or 59%.

The Edge Calculus puts in sharp relief the uselessness of determining fault. Instead, it makes clear that everyone has to take full responsibility for the quality of the behaviors of every element in the chain. This is an unfamiliar approach to conventional business models, because businesses are loathe to accept indirect expenses that they can avoid simply by pointing the finger of blame somewhere else.

From this discussion you might imagine that I think the problem of the Edges is insoluble, but that is far from true. The digital revolution is changing everything, including the rules of business. It is conceivable that companies will recognize that, while it’s not their fault, it is their responsibility to assure that every part of the execution chain operates with the same high quality as every other part. Delegating the responsibility to another vendor is like saying, “That hole is only in your end of the boat.”

What each organization has to do today is to regard the edges of its products with as much diligence and attention as they give the center. The quality of both their outside system connections (known as application program interfaces, or APIs) and their user interfaces demand levels of expertise and investment that have historically fallen short.

One of the most noticeable characteristics of man-made complex systems is that they don’t work.

One of the most noticeable characteristics of man-made complex systems is that they don’t work. Even when they do work, they don’t work well, have unintended and undesirable side effects, and cost more in time and resources than expected. Software systems are archetypal examples of this, but agricultural, political, and financial systems have the same issues. The primary origin of the dysfunction comes from the edges.

Written by: Alan Cooper, Medium
Posted by: Situated Research

The post The Edges appeared first on Situated Research.

While the term “UX” is relatively new, the concept of user-friendly design has been around for generations. “Good design is good business,” the second president of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, famously told Wharton students in 1973. “We are convinced,” he said, “that good design can materially help make a good product reach its full potential.” 

Watson had just retired as IBM CEO, having grown the company tenfold. He predicted the trend that made companies like Apple, Facebook and Google what they are today. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, but it made one very easy to use. Facebook wasn’t the first social network, but its simplicity was instrumental to its growth. And there were many other search engines before Google, but none made it so easy to find the most relevant information. All three companies became successful by improving user experience for products that already existed.

User experience contributes to many other success stories. Jeff Bezos invested 100 times more into customer experience than advertising during the first year of Amazon. AirBnB’s Mike Gebbia credits UX with taking the company to $10 billion. Tom Proulx, co-founder of Intuit, was one of the pioneers of usability testing, putting emphasis on ease of use in his products.

Good user experience is clearly good for business. Studies show that companies that invest in UX see a lower cost of customer acquisition, lower support cost, increased customer retention and increased market share, according to a study done by Forrester. When compared to their peers, the top 10 companies leading in customer experience outperformed the S&P index with close to triple the returns. Forester Research shows that, on average, every dollar invested in UX brings 100 dollars in return. That’s an ROI of a whopping 9,900 percent.

To Improve User Experience, Start by Observing Customers Interact with Your Product

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

In my agency, 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 these important decisions. As a result, websites are designed for the executives and not for the customers.

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. Mental models can then be constructed outlining users’ behavioral patterns. In turn, those can be applied to prototype products that better serve the users’ needs. With continuous testing and adjustments, you can improve ease of use, reduce mistakes and increase overall customer satisfaction.

Despite popular belief, usability testing doesn’t have to be conducted behind mirrored glass with hundreds of participants. According to Norman Nielsen Group, the world’s foremost authority in UX, observing and interviewing just five users usually uncovers about 85 percent of all usability problems. Simply recruit five participants who represent your actual users and offer them an incentive to use your product in an observed environment. Give them real tasks to complete. Ask them to think aloud, but don’t help or guide them. Observe their behavior and listen to their feedback to uncover potential issues.

Make Good UX a Part of Your Internal Processes

After fixing usability problems, think about how you can incorporate UX design into your process to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. One way to do so is by integrating pattern libraries. A pattern library is a collection of previously tested user interfaces that solve common design problems. Organizations that rely on pattern libraries, as opposed to reinventing the wheel each time, see a 50 percent increase in product development efficiency. You can develop your own pattern library or use public libraries like UI Patterns or the Yahoo Design Pattern Library.

In business, speed and efficiency are paramount. I recommend starting with low-fidelity wireframes. At Intechnic, we sketch initial ideas on paper and focus on only the most important elements first. We use Sharpies — thick lines force you to limit the details you can fit on a sheet of paper. Eventually, we transfer designs onto a dry-erase board where we can fill in more detail and play with variations. Once designs pass internal reviews, we convert them into high-fidelity interactive prototypes that simulate real-life scenarios and can be tested with real users. There are a number of tools for that: Axure, Uxpin, Balsamiq and iRise, just to name a few.

User acceptance is critical to any product, project or service. A good rule of thumb: test early (with real users) and test often. Businesses simply fail without happy customers. Make yours happy with good UX.

Written by: Andrew Kucheriavy, Intechnic (via Forbes)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Good UX Is Good Business: How To Reap Its Benefits appeared first on Situated Research.