How To Be A Games User Researcher

"games user research is the definitive guide to methods and practices for games user professionals, researchers and students seeking additional expertise or starting advice in the game development industry. It is the go-to volume for everyone working with games, with an emphasis on those new to the field."--Back cover.

Love video games? Start your career making them better. Games user researchers run playtests to ensure games are understandable and enjoyable, and are a key part of making games that people love. The video games industry is full of passionate people who care about making fun experiences. If you love games, and want to make them better, consider a career in games user research. Drawing upon ten years of experience working on top games and helping people start their career in games How To Be A Games User Researcher is the essential guide on how to run professional quality playtest studies and get a job in the games industry. What's in the book? Discover How games development works and where research fits in How to plan, run, analyse and debrief professional quality playtests The importance of building relationships with game teams How to start a career in user research The skills required to excel at job interviews Who is this book for? This book is for: Students considering a career in games user research UX researchers looking to transition into games New games user researchers Academics studying games design, development, or HCI Game designers and developers looking to improve the quality of their playtests About the author Steve Bromley led research studies for many of PlayStation's top European games including Horizon: Zero Dawn, SingStar and the PlayStation VR launch lineup. He continues to work with games and VR studios to improve the player experience of their games. For the last five years, Steve Bromley has run a games user research mentoring scheme, which has partnered over one hundred students with more than fifty industry professionals from top companies such as Sony, EA, Valve, Ubisoft, and Microsoft, and helped many people get their first job in games. This book covers many of the topics that mentees have asked as they start their games user research career.

"Fundamentally, making games is designing with others, everyone contributing from different angles towards the best possible product. Conclusively, Garcia-Ruiz has chosen a collection of chapters that demonstrates several different aspects of working in gaming and working with others that stands to raise the level of expertise in the field." —Veronica Zammitto, Senior Lead Games User Research, Electronic Arts, Inc., from the Foreword Usability is about making a product easy to use while meeting the requirements of target users. Applied to video games, this means making the game accessible and enjoyable to the player. Video games with high usability are generally played efficiently and frequently while enjoying higher sales volumes. The case studies in this book present the latest interdisciplinary research and applications of games user research in determining and developing usability to improve the video game user experience at the human–computer interface level. Some of the areas examined include practical and ethical concerns in conducting usability testing with children, audio experiences in games, tangible and graphical game interfaces, controller testing, and business models in mobile gaming. Games User Research: A Case Study Approach provides a highly useful resource for researchers, practitioners, lecturers, and students in developing and applying methods for testing player usability as well as for conducting games user research. It gives the necessary theoretical and practical background for designing and conducting a test for usability with an eye toward modifying software interfaces to improve human–computer interaction between the player and the game.

Making a successful video game is hard. Even games that are successful at launch may fail to engage and retain players in the long term due to issues with the user experience (UX) that they are delivering. The game user experience accounts for the whole experience players have with a video game, from first hearing about it to navigating menus and progressing in the game. UX as a discipline offers guidelines to assist developers in creating the experience they want to deliver, shipping higher quality games (whether it is an indie game, AAA game, or "serious game"), and meeting their business goals while staying true to their design and artistic intent. In a nutshell, UX is about understanding the gamer’s brain: understanding human capabilities and limitations to anticipate how a game will be perceived, the emotions it will elicit, how players will interact with it, and how engaging the experience will be. This book is designed to equip readers of all levels, from student to professional, with neuroscience knowledge and user experience guidelines and methodologies. These insights will help readers identify the ingredients for successful and engaging video games, empowering them to develop their own unique game recipe more efficiently, while providing a better experience for their audience. Key Features Provides an overview of how the brain learns and processes information by distilling research findings from cognitive science and psychology research in a very accessible way. Topics covered include: "neuromyths", perception, memory, attention, motivation, emotion, and learning. Includes numerous examples from released games of how scientific knowledge translates into game design, and how to use a UX framework in game development. Describes how UX can guide developers to improve the usability and the level of engagement a game provides to its target audience by using cognitive psychology knowledge, implementing human-computer interaction principles, and applying the scientific method (user research). Provides a practical definition of UX specifically applied to games, with a unique framework. Defines the most relevant pillars for good usability (ease of use) and good "engage-ability" (the ability of the game to be fun and engaging), translated into a practical checklist. Covers design thinking, game user research, game analytics, and UX strategy at both a project and studio level. Offers unique insights from a UX expert and PhD in psychology who has been working in the entertainment industry for over 10 years. This book is a practical tool that any professional game developer or student can use right away and includes the most complete overview of UX in games existing today.

Successful products require good decisions. Reliable information about what users are trying to achieve, their context and whether they can and will use your product is essential to making good product decisions. User researchers run robust and repeatable studies to find that information, but they need some tools and support to get started. Building User Research Teams is a practical guide on how to build a research team of any size, starting from convincing colleagues why they need a user research team, through the development and implementation of the tools and processes needed, to running high quality studies and mapping the future development of a growing research team. Learn how to: Advocate for user research inside your organisation Budget for and equip a research team Create the templates and tools needed to run research Run studies that are impactful and accurate Optimise your research team's workflow Grow a research team long-term This book is useful for: Companies looking to hire their first researcher New research leaders establishing a team Independent researchers in companies looking to maximise their impact Designers, product managers and UX professionals wanting to incorporate research best practice into their work

Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User Research, Second Edition, provides practitioners and researchers with the information they need to confidently quantify, qualify, and justify their data. The book presents a practical guide on how to use statistics to solve common quantitative problems that arise in user research. It addresses questions users face every day, including, Is the current product more usable than our competition? Can we be sure at least 70% of users can complete the task on their first attempt? How long will it take users to purchase products on the website? This book provides a foundation for statistical theories and the best practices needed to apply them. The authors draw on decades of statistical literature from human factors, industrial engineering, and psychology, as well as their own published research, providing both concrete solutions (Excel formulas and links to their own web-calculators), along with an engaging discussion on the statistical reasons why tests work and how to effectively communicate results. Throughout this new edition, users will find updates on standardized usability questionnaires, a new chapter on general linear modeling (correlation, regression, and analysis of variance), with updated examples and case studies throughout. Completely updated to provide practical guidance on solving usability testing problems with statistics for any project, including those using Six Sigma practices Includes new and revised information on standardized usability questionnaires Includes a completely new chapter introducing correlation, regression, and analysis of variance Shows practitioners which test to use, why they work, and best practices for application, along with easy-to-use Excel formulas and web-calculators for analyzing data Recommends ways for researchers and practitioners to communicate results to stakeholders in plain English

Once, human-computer interaction was limited to a privileged few. Today, our contact with computing technology is pervasive, ubiquitous, and global. Work and study is computer mediated, domestic and commercial systems are computerized, healthcare is being reinvented, navigation is interactive, and entertainment is computer generated. As technology has grown more powerful, so the field of human-computer interaction has responded with more sophisticated theories and methodologies. Bringing these developments together, The Wiley Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction explores the many and diverse aspects of human-computer interaction while maintaining an overall perspective regarding the value of human experience over technology.

Evaluating interactive systems for their user experience (UX) is a standard approach in industry and research today. This book explores the areas of game design and development and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) as ways to understand the various contributing aspects of the overall gaming experience. Fully updated, extended and revised this book is based upon the original publication Evaluating User Experience in Games, and provides updated methods and approaches ranging from user- orientated methods to game specific approaches. New and emerging methods and areas explored include physiologically- orientated UX evaluation, user behaviour, telemetry based methods and social play as effective evaluation techniques for gaming design and evolving user-experience. Game User Experience Evaluation allows researchers, PhD students as well as game designers and developers to get an overview on available methods for all stages of the development life cycle.