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Usability Testing with 5 Users

Usability Testing with 5 Users
Related:  Play-testing

Paul Sztajer's Blog - How many players should you playtest with? Reposted from www.throwthelookingglass.comSo, you've started developing your game, and you've got your basic gameplay done. It's time to start playtesting*. The question occurs to you: how many people should be playtesting my game? *If you've got something you can playtest with, you should be playtesting. As soon as possible. Jakob Nielsen, usability king, says that you only need 5 users to test each iteration of a design, and in many ways, this philosophy applies directly to playtesting. Nielsen's basic argument is that testing is about improving a design rather than finding every single problem. There's a caviet to this: if you're just sending your game to 5 friends and asking them to 'tell you what they think', 3-5 probably isn't enough. There are ways of getting almost as much information from your testers in an online playtest. There are two exceptions to this rule of 3-5. So that's it.

10 Heuristics for User Interface Design Visibility of system status The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time. (Read full article on visibility of system status.) Match between system and the real world The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. (Read full article on the match between the system and the real world.) User control and freedom Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Consistency and standards Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Error prevention Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. (Read full article on preventing user errors.) Recognition rather than recall Help and documentation

UX London 2015 Being a UX person on an Agile project can really suck, and for lots of reasons. But, one of them springs from UX people working hard to think holistically about their product, while Agile developers are working hard to break things down into tiny buildable parts. User Story Mapping is simple UX-centric approach for understanding your product or feature idea from a whole UX perspective while still breaking down the product into small backlog items. In this workshop you’ll learn how to build maps to understand how users work today and to identify opportunities for improvement. You’ll learn how to build maps to describe feature ideas and explore strategies for incremental release, and iterative and incremental development. Workshop Outline: Mapping essentials Elements of a story mapThe lifecycle of a story mapSimple models and shared understanding Story mapping planning strategies Finding minimal viable releasesIdentifying product experimentsCreating a risk-reducing development strategy

LE BILAN-PROJET Lorsque nous vous rencontrons, que vous soyez étudiant en cours de cursus ou en fin de parcours, vous ne voyez pas toujours l'utilité de faire un bilan. Travail long et contraignant, le jeu en vaut-il vraiment la chandelle ? Ne pouvez-vous pas plutôt y réfléchir au fur et à mesure de vos besoins ? C'est bien sûr une préparation indispensable pour s'armer d'outils efficaces, logiques et bien argumentés ne pas être déstabilisé en entretien par des questions-pièges auxquelles vous ne pourrez apporter de réponse satisfaisante faute d'y avoir suffisamment réfléchi élaborer un ou plusieurs projets professionnels qui vous permettront de cibler avec pertinence les entreprises auxquelles vous apporterez une collaboration efficace ainsi que les fonctions dans lesquelles vous aurez le maximum de chances de réussir construire un argumentaire qui vous permettra de vendre sur le marché le produit que vous représentez. le savoir : Que sais-je ? C'est votre potentiel. le savoir-être : Qui suis-je ?

Features - Practical Game Playtesting: A Wii-Based Case Study [Sidhe's Griffiths discusses in depth how the GripShift developer playtested, and then took that feedback to improve, their Wii version of the recent Speed Racer game, from Wiimote tweaks to difficulty changes.] Playtesting a game for the very first time is an incredibly daunting task. I'm not talking about all the preparation that goes into it; I'm talking about the abundance of negativity that is bound to be thrown your way. The first time players get their hands on the game always results in problems -- and when it comes time to write up the report, I realize with each soul-destroying point that it's my job to then present this information to the developers. However, the light at the end of the tunnel is that we can find and tackle these problems while the game is still in our hands. There is always the tendency, though (and I myself am guilty of this) to believe that your game is going to be perfect. Yet, we did get it out on time, and it actually received pretty good reviews.

What if testing was a part of the design process One of the great benefits of digital design is that it can be tested and measured. Yet so many aren’t doing that. Partly we can blame the workflow, where the client buys the design from the designer and focuses on aesthetics, not the results. But what if that could be included into our deliverables? To test or not to test Although testing is a powerful tool used by pros, there is no reason why you shouldn’t test simpler sites even if it's a portfolio or a marketing landing page. There are three main types of testing: Testing the IF. Misconceptions of testing Testing can give a lot of insights and data if done right, but also there are plenty of ways to screw it up. Additionally, instead of approaching your average users, it's more interesting to talk to “extreme” users who really love or hate your product. A/B testing A/B testing or split testing is something you hear most often. Heatmaps and clickmaps can show you where the users are clicking. User testing Surveys Summary

The NEW LinkedIn Profile Explained. People don’t like change, it’s just the way we’re hardwired. You get used to doing (or seeing) something, it becomes familiar. Like driving a car, complex initially but after a while it becomes second nature. Background The LinkedIn Profile made it’s debut in 2009. “We want to make it look like [LinkedIn] is from the year 2012 and not like it’s from 1999,” Senior Experience Designer Marissa Dulaney says. Project Katy As in Katy Perry, which makes no sense for a professional networking platform, right? The references to “she” and citing Katy Perry, a well known female icon for inspiration for the re-design is quite deliberate – nearly twice as many men (63%) as women (37%) use LinkedIn (November 2010 Pew Survey). “Signal-to-Noise Ratio” (SNR) I have to admit that my initial reaction to the New Profile was negative. So What’s TRULY Important On A LinkedIn Profile? What’s Non-Essential? The stuff that’s been tucked away out of sight, deemed not as important as those 5 core elements:

Lennart Nacke's Blog - Biometrics, Game Evaluation and UX: Approach with caution The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. My colleague Steve Fairclough recently posted an article on PhysiologicalComputing.net in which he discusses the potential pitfalls of biometric research and how it is currently being sold to the game industry. Steve outlines that "psychophysiological methods are combined with computer games in two types of context: applied psychology research and game evaluation in a commercial context. Similar to Mike Ambinder's presentation of user research and game design at Valve (PDF), he makes the point that games in this context are analysed using principles of experimental psychology. They are used as tasks or virtual worlds within which a research can study the behavior of players (you might recall John Hopson's Gamasutra article on behavioral game design).

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