Nodes of Design#62: User Research in Games by Steve Bromley

Nodes of Design

Steve Bromley is an experienced user researcher and author of two famous books - Building User Research Teams' and ‘How to be a games user researcher. He started the first user research team for UK's Parliament and for Reach, the UK’s largest publisher. Before this, he was a lead user researcher for the PlayStation VR headset and many of PlayStation’s titles, including Horizon: Zero Dawn, No Man's Sky & SingStar.

In this episode, Steve had shared great insights on User Research in Games; we discussed how user research in games happens, how different it is from the traditional UX research process, and how to synthesise research and convert them into artefacts that are understood across the teams. We then discussed how to apply usability heuristics to video games to make sure they are fun to play with and different ways to measure the success/failure metrics in gaming research?

Takeaways: What is user research in games? How to make games more fun? Success and failure metric in game user research

Resources Mentioned by Steve

How To Be A Games User Researcher: https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Games-User-Researcher-ebook/dp/B08T6BKNMF

Links to more Games User Research resources and community links: https://gamesuserresearch.com/games-user-research-start-here/

Books Steve described:

Just Enough Research - Erika Hall ( https://abookapart.com/products/just-enough-research )

Quantifying the User Experience - James Lewis and Jeff Sauro ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780123849687/quantifying-the-user-experience )

Think like a UX researcher by David Travis and Philip Hodgson ( http://uxresearchbook.com/ )

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