A one-day in-person workshop led by Games User Researcher Steve Bromley that provides game development professionals with the essential skills needed to run impactful playtests.
Most developers like the idea of playtests. But they find it challenging to prioritise in a busy development schedule.
It's not clear when to run your playtests. Finding participants is hard - if not impossible! Then biased questions and interpretation lead us to findings that feel obvious or underwhelming.
All of this adds up to fewer playtests, low impact studies and poor return on investment for your playtests.
It doesn't have to be this way, and the user research discipline has built up a toolkit of reliable and robust approaches to ensure playtests are effective. Steve Bromley has worked with many of the world's leading game studios and publishers, to help them run studies that are lean, impactful and inspire game developers.
In this practical hands-on session, we will cover:
- When to fit playtesting and user research into your game development schedule, and how to figure out what to learn
- Research methods, and picking the best approach for your team
- Designing unbiased studies
- Best practice for moderating and running playtests
- A reliable and efficient approach to data analysis, and how to decide what really matters from your playtest
You will plan and run a user research study during this session, leave with a collection of templates you can apply immediately and have the opportunity to answer your own playtesting questions - leaving you equipped to run better playtests at your own studio.
About Steve Bromley: Steve Bromley is a games user research consultant, helping teams use player insight to create successful games.
He works with publishers, platforms and studios of all sizes to transform their game development process, and build a product strategy to combine player data with creativity. He work from ideation to post-launch in order to de-risk game development, and make games players love.
Prior to this he was a senior user researcher for PlayStation and worked on many of their top European titles, including Horizon Zero Dawn, SingStar, the LittleBigPlanet series and the PlayStation VR lineup.
He started the Games User Research mentoring scheme, which has linked hundreds of students with industry professionals from top games companies such as Sony, EA, Valve, Ubisoft and Microsoft. Steve wrote the bestselling book How To Be A Games User Researcher to share the expertise needed to work in the games industry.
He regularly speaks at games industry conferences and on podcasts about games user research + playtesting, and has been recognised as a member of BAFTA. He also wrote the bestselling book Building User Research Teams, and help teams build an impactful research practice in-house.
Cost: £120 cost per attendee (£100 for Ukie Members using discount code: "UKIE20") Tickets available here.
This is an in-person session, held at Ukie's offices (18a, Blackbull Yard, 24 - 28 Hatton Wall, London EC1N 8JH) on Tuesday, 21st May, beginning at 10:00 and finishing at 16:00, with an hour's break for lunch.