CHI 2023 course

ACM CHI 2023, virtual course C05, April 12, 2023. Instructors: Lennart Nacke, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, and Anders Drachen. Moved here from acagamic.com.

This online course taught how user experience (UX) methods work in games. It had three units: UX design for games, games user research, and game analytics. The material comes from the book Games User Research (Oxford University Press), and the book’s editors taught it. Participants learned to recognize, analyze, and understand player feedback so they could make sound design decisions. Exercises covered how to identify what shapes the way people play and how to fold feedback into the design process, using observation, interviews, and surveys.

Course introduction

The course ran in four parts, with a coffee break and a meal break between them:

1. Introduction and icebreaker
2. UX design for games
3. UX research for games: methods and activities
4. Game analytics

Instructors

Lennart Nacke is a full professor at the University of Waterloo, where he leads the HCI Games Group.

Pejman Mirza-Babaei is a faculty member at Ontario Tech University who specializes in user research and interaction design. He has worked as a director of user research and has helped ship more than 20 games, and his work ranges from delivery robots to augmented and virtual reality. He co-authored Games User Research and The Game Designer’s Playbook.

Anders Drachen is a professor and director of the SDU Metaverse Lab at the University of Southern Denmark. For more than 20 years he has studied large-scale behavioural analysis and data science in games. He co-authored Games User Research and Game Data Science.

Slides

UX design versus UI design in games

Presented by Lennart Nacke

This short talk explained how to design UX and UI in games and why the difference matters. Getting both right makes games more engaging, enjoyable, and accessible, which raises player satisfaction and retention. Many game designers struggle with it for several reasons:

• They confuse UX design with UI design, or misread the roles of UX and UI designers.
• They focus on one side, such as visuals, at the expense of the other, such as usability.
• They don’t understand their target players and their needs well enough.
• They give too little attention to accessibility and inclusion.
• They neglect the details of UI elements and game mechanics.
• They struggle to weave narrative and gameplay together.

UX design looks at the whole experience

UX design aims for enjoyable, accessible, and engaging play by considering every part of a game, from controls and mechanics to narrative and aesthetics. It examines how players interact with the game and how they respond emotionally.

UI design covers what players see and touch

UI design is part of UX design. It covers the visual and interactive parts of the interface, such as menus, icons, and HUD elements. Good UI makes these parts clear, easy to use, and pleasing to look at, because they shape both the experience and its hedonic qualities.

Four examples

Narrative anchoring in The Last of Us. The story anchors the gameplay. The game establishes the bond between Joel and his daughter early, and the player first plays as the helpless daughter and later as the guardian. That emotional anchor colours the whole game.

Heuristics and accessibility in Fallout 3. Heuristics such as the Game Accessibility Principles help make all game information accessible. Fallout 3’s targeting system, VATS, shows players the chance of a successful attack and the damage they will deal.

Diegetic UI in Tomb Raider. Interfaces can sit outside the game world (non-diegetic) or inside it (diegetic). Tomb Raider builds context-sensitive instructions into the environment and uses colour to show where the character must go.

Weenies in Half-Life 2. Walt Disney Imagineers coined “weenie” for a landmark that draws people toward it. Level designers use weenies to direct attention and give players a sense of direction. In Half-Life 2, the Citadel pulls players toward it throughout the game.

Narrative anchors, heuristics, diegetic interfaces, and weenies all show UX and UI design working together to make a game engaging and enjoyable.

UX research on a budget

Presented by Pejman Mirza-Babaei

Students, academics, and game companies, especially small studios, often ask how to run UX research on a budget and where they can cut corners. Pejman has consulted with many small studios that lack research teams, so the topic matters to him. The talk covered why budget research matters, common problems, and tips for doing it better.

What studios call testing

Game companies use “playtesting” for many different activities:

1. Internal dev testing. Developers play their own game to check how features are coming along. It helps, but it isn’t UX research or usability testing in the academic sense.
2. Expo demos. Studios show their game at events and gather reactions. This is closer to marketing than to UX research.
3. QA testing. Quality assurance staff hunt for bugs and sometimes suggest usability fixes. This is also not UX research.
4. A/B testing. Teams compare two versions of a feature to see which works better. Useful, but not UX research or usability testing.
5. Ideation testing. Participants play with the product while the studio looks for ideas rather than specific feedback.
6. Usability and appreciation testing. This is what most academics mean by UX research: studying players’ experience and satisfaction.

Getting good data from limited resources

All of these methods can improve a game. The question is whether studios can combine them to save money. If a small studio is showing its game at an expo anyway, can it also collect data to improve the game?

The answer depends on telling reliable, valid data from misleading data. Many studios get this wrong and draw false conclusions from demos or internal testing. UX researchers can help studios judge how reliable their data is so they make better decisions.