Steve Bromley - User Research

Usability and User Research for Websites, Software and Games

Test with real users – not your team

'Free pizza and coke! Just play our game for an hour’. Sounds like a good deal right? And pretty easy to organise, just pulling kids of the street. It can even be done in the pub, for mobile devices. Even this ‘free pizza’ recruitment is better than testing your game (or website, or application) with…

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Evaluating User Experience in Games – Book Review

Regina Bernhaupt presents an academic guide to the application of user experience principles to games, as part of a series by Springer Books on HCI, and claims to represent the ‘coming of age’ of video games as a medium. The book is essentially a collection of academic papers, largely from recent conferences, and draws upon…

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Make work fun – examples of applying the UX of games

I write this blog out of personal interest. It never really seems like work, and so I’d be unlikely to blog more often if I received points for doing so (although I do like free things!). However this isn’t always the case – sometimes there are jobs you just have to do, regardless of how…

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The Problems with Surveys for User Experience Tests

In the run up to Margaret Thatchers’ election victory in 1979, a poll was taken to estimate who would vote for her. Only 1 in 100 said yes. However, as revealed by the final results, 1 in 3 actually voted for her. The poll was inaccurate, and inappropriate for the task. Surveys are a common…

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Applying Games UX lessons makes dull tasks fun!

I recently watched Sebastian Deterding’s presentation Deterding does provide some critical analysis of this model – what happens on day 2, for example? Is it still fun to recycle? I also question the justification provided by Volkswagen that the bottle bank performed better than a standard one. Although it did in the example, when the…

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