Tuesday 1 July 2008

Professional Game Usability

Here are a few companies that do games usability:

UK:
Epicentre (Brighton) are a part of Epic, and say they do games work too.
AmberLight (London) are a usability company that have done some games work before, particularly with Sony.
BunnyFoot (Oxford, Edinburgh, London) do games testing and have written some academic papers too.

Europe:
Experience Park (Hamburg) do the regular usability stuff with games

SQA Partners (Estonia) also claim to conduct games testing, and refer to Sony's TRC and Microsoft's TCR. However their test lab does not appear to be set up for console usability testing in a home-like environment.

Australia:
Usability One (Sydney) are a usability company that seem to do all the regular stuff with games

USA:
Orbus Gameworks (Boston, MA) "Aleph Metrics Suite" does data collection - but how do you analyse this data?

Valve (Washington) track some data in SteamWorks, their electronic distribution / community solution

Behavioristics (California) is Desurvire's company (with published games usability papers) where they use RITE and more typical usability methods, they also mention "Game Metrics (new!)" but have no details about what this means to them.

Xeo Design (California) are run by Nicole Lazzaro, who's written pieces on user testing and emotions (also in the HCI Handbook, in the same chapter as Pagulayan et al's)

And of course there's Microsoft (Redmond)

Ronin UX is Bill Fulton's (ex-MGSUR) company. They look like they do general usability, but Fulton's publications include loads of important games usability (thanks Darius!)

3 comments:

Darius Kazemi said...

At Orbus we just provide the data collection software and services. We do some consulting on analysis, but more from a game design perspective than usability. We have informal relations with an number of usability experts and we're hoping that one day we can work on a project jointly with someone to combine our data with their methodology and hopefully get some stellar results.

One glaring omission from your list would be Bill Fulton's company, Ronin User Experience. Bill is a former Microsoft User Research guy who founded Ronin a year or two ago.

http://www.roninux.com/

Anonymous said...

Hi -

I'm the MD of Amberlight and you're correct - we do a large-ish amount of games testing, these days on both consoles and mobile devices.

We're definitely finding that clients are recognising more and more the value of playtesting that goes beyond straight bug-elimination and looks instead at the whole experience. From what the client teams tell us, the work we're doing is definitely helping to create better, smoother and more immersive games. Can we help make games more addictive? Who knows? Show me a way of predicting that and we'll go into business together and make our fortunes ;-)

As regards data capture... we'd love to talk to you about this, Darius. Can you drop me a line? My email is my first name at amberlight.co.uk

Cheers

Anonymous said...

Ooops... missed out the hyphen. It's amber-light.co.uk
Sorry