10 out of  50 US top grossing games are social casino giants, an indication of how dominant this genre is with an massively loyal target audience.   Superdata research predicts massive growth in this segement You may wonder, why people are sinking millions of dollars in to these games which can not be played for real money! give no cash returns, unlike the real life casinos! & online gambling counterparts! I remember in 2010 while working at slot machine giant WMS (acquired by scientific gaming for $1.5 billion). When they launched a variant of their popular flagship (online real money) brand ‘Jackpot Party’ as an F2P game on Facebook, everyone was genuinely surprised, it racked up 25K overnight!! Traditional casino gaming manufacturers could not fathom what would drive people to play these no real money counterparts? Have they discovered another virgin goldmine waiting to be explored? Flash forward 2016,...

Co-authored with Steven Gaston This post was originally featured on Gamasutra In part 2 of this post (in case you missed, Part 1 here), as promised we will cover how to set up external usability tests, preparation done at developers’ (client) and research agencies end, see how internal and external UX designers work in sync combining their final observation & analysis to produce unbiased results. In Part 1, we saw how most studios typically conduct usability test in ways that allow biases to creep in which could drastically alter the results. We are happy to know there are studios that have a more sophisticated UX pipeline & UX designers (some of your comments hinted at that) in place who conduct sessions in a clinical setting. Our process will outline the ideal practices that should be a part of the DNA of any usability session. [bctt tweet=”Part 2 of a handy #UX...

Co-authored with Steven Gaston User experience design has become the mainstay of creating intuitive and rewarding offline, online digital experiences, be it across web, apps physical products or more recently GAMES. Most top tier gaming companies big or small (be it PC, mobile or console) like Blizzard, Riot, Sony, EA, Zynga, King, Ubisoft, Gameloft understand this scenery change and are now more readily hiring UX talent & integrating UX design in their development pipeline seriously. I remember finding a big void on this subject a year back and have been writing on the subject of UX design in games under the heading of UX Insights since last year. Analysing F2P games and deconstructing prevailing and upcoming games industry macro, micro trends. UX Walkthrough?…….What’s it about. This series takes the subject of UX in games a step further by sharing with you some of the methods and techniques used in...

The question I ask is – can we go beyond? Every UX, Game, Product designer aspires enhancing prototypes to map the complete user flows, not just bits and bobs. This article is divided into Tactical and Strategy layers. I will cover the former first. As an UX Director, I have to continuously work on both Tactical and Strategy sides of UX with my team and stakeholder groups to enhance the quality, push the limits and strengthen the integrity of our UX pipeline and process. In my last article Here, I detailed the process and benefits of low to mid fidelity prototypes where we built a device ready interactive version for user testing. Example below of our low-fi proto. built during the last post. My last post focused entirely on just prototyping a low-fi stand-alone feature. This time we will build a hi-fi prototype with inter-connected features, hence testing the entire...

Why game UI matters Maybe you want to help the players find their way through the menus. You may also want to increase your sales. Regardless of your goal, you can achieve it all by using the principles of design the right way and measuring the impact of your changes. We want people to find their way around the game, to even focus on the game. To make this a reality, we should remove friction in the interface. We don’t want the player to waste time in the menus. We want them to get the information they need through the interface. No more, no less. Unlike the gameplay, you pretty much always want to simplify navigation as much as you can. This has nothing to do with the game’s difficulty or “casual” gaming. In mobile titles, the interface does not only allow...

What is UX Design? User experience – or UX – is often a domain we don’t know too much about as game developers. It isn’t big in games yet. However, it’s a common role in software development teams, and for a good reason. UX designers are an essential bridge between the engineers and the users. Their role is to make the program clearer, and as intuitive as possible. Games are applications as well. We want the user – the player – to be able to pick up the game by himself. To overcome challenges on his own. In other words, we want his experience – the user’s experience – to feel great and seamless. If the game designer adds features and mechanics to the game, the UX designer subtracts anything clunky, that adds noise, to make the game more enjoyable....

Someone has chosen your app over the 1,500,000 other apps in the App Store or on Google Play. That’s fantastic! The next couple of moments after a user downloads a free-to-play (F2P) game are critical. Users are fickle and it takes a compelling introduction to keep them coming back. Worse yet, the cost of downloading another app is also $0 and takes just a few taps and a few seconds. In order to engage users, game developers should focus on the first time user experience. This is one of, if not the, most crucial parts of any F2P mobile game. The tutorial helps onboard users, convinces them your game provides value, improves retention and helps convert non-payers to paying users. The following tips will help measure and improve the first time user experience in your F2P game. 1. Make Getting...

App discovery is tough. With over 1,500,000 apps in each of the App Store and Google Play, standing out from the crowd takes some work. Most game developers will need to spend some marketing dollars on paid user acquisition in order to be successful. Below are the seven deadly sins of mobile user acquisition, and how to avoid these hazards.   1. The first sin of mobile user acquisition is not soft launching User acquisition begins with preparation. Soft Launching may be related to overall game design, but it’s extremely important to do before starting user acquisition. No game developer wants to shell out briefcases full of cash in order to drive users to an unpolished game. The return on investment will likely underwhelm if the game has not been tested and vetted by consumers. Soft launching, that is launching...

Many successful games seem to have lately forgotten to include usability, which used to be the alpha and omega for game development, in their development process.