Marci Ikeler

Usability Research Applied to Immersive Interfaces

I’m a bit late on this, but there was awesome article in Boxes and Arrows this week titled Researching Video Games the UX Way. It’s a detailed write up of how Bolt|Peters performed usability testing on Spore.

The basic take-away is that the team had to rely on a much more open-ended process to capture relevant feedback, since games are, by nature, immersive experiences. Normally in usability testing, a moderator will lead a user through a set of relatively structured tasks. Although there can be room for diversion (testing philosophies vary on this, but I perfer an approach that is more user-directed than moderator-directed), the test is, overall, a guided experience.

Bolt|Peters realized that this approach wouldn’t work well for a video game, in which people play in different ways and aren’t necessarily trying to complete any specific task. So, instead of guiding through a task list, they simply let the users play the game while “thinking out loud”.

I think that this approach would be very interesting if applied to other immersive experiences, for example in advertising. Right now there is a huge gap between projects that are designed to be usable and those that are designed to be fun. In a lot of cases this makes sense (who really cares about a usable micro-site?), but some of the learnings from traditional usability testing could certainly be applied to more engaging experiences.

If you don’t have time to read the article, you should certainly check out the highlights video (at the bottom of the page) — I certainly have never gotten reactions like that in any of my usability tests!

Via Boxes and Arrows: Researching Video Games the UX Way