In conducting research for my presentation on "Extending the Video Game Experience to Conventional UI's", last month I interviewed Eric Matthews, who's the creative director of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. We discussed user interface design in games, the creative process, and the role of usability testing in game development. The discussion focused on the development of the EyeToy webcamera games that I'll be demonstrating in my talk, and the case study highlights abundant overlaps with our world.
Mr. Matthews was extremely generous with his time, and I ended up with much more material than I could use in my presentation -- so I've
posted the full text of the interview to my blog (including an explanation for this post's title). Here's an excerpt:
JF: Did you do any testing of the game with users?EM: This is going to sound terrible, but EyeToy: Play was the first game where we did formal user testing, and that was only once the game was finished. We had done ad hoc testing using the people in the QA department, children of coworkers, things like that. But this was the first time we recruited real users and set up at a facility behind the one-way glass and so forth.
And it was an absolute nightmare. Once people were into the game they had a great time playing it, but they couldn’t get there quickly enough because the flow of the menus was too long winded. People also couldn’t figure out the right distance to stand, and then someone would walk across the room in front of the camera and inadvertently trigger something onscreen. It came to a head when the players kept accidentally cancelling the setup process for their profiles. Around then Ron Festejo got up and said “Stop the blasted thing, I can’t bare it anymore!”
John Ferrara
Information Architect, Vanguard
Labels: interview, sony, testing, ui design, video games