Services
We provide UX consulting services for the analysis of the usability and "Quality of Life" features of your game
UX Consulting
Adal, the lead developer of Sine Fine and director of the Vindemiatrix Collective, in his day job works as an Associate Professor at the department of Computer Science at a university in Belgium. He has a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and specialises in fundamental research on Virtual Reality and immersive technologies. He is available to provide critical evaluation of the usability of User Interfaces of any complexity.
HCI is the discipline in the field of Computer Science that specialises on the usability of a computer system or user interface. In the gaming world, players are more familiar with the term "Quality of Life" (QoL), which is typically used to refer to the degree to which the UI of a game is indeed, useable and easy to understand.
Usability or QoL are fundamental aspects of any game, from first person shooters to grand strategy games. As a player, you will surely be familiar with how frustrating playing a game can become if the UI is not working correctly or lacks critical QoL features.
Combining decades of experience as both an academic, a player, an expert game developer and software engineer, I can analyse the UI of your game, identify critical issues and provide solutions based on state-of-the-art HCI literature with an eye on the best way to implement them.
A practical example
As both an academic and practitioner I am keen to actually put theory into practice. In the development of my game, Sine Fine, one of the first problems I encountered was the difficulty in selecting small objects from the Galaxy Map. From a technical perspective, an object becomes selected if there is a ray that intersects its bounding box. This naive approach does not work well when the object has a very small size on screen.
Luckily, academic literature provides decades of work on the best selection techniques for 2D interfaces. One of my favourites is the so-called Bubble Cursor, which can be adapted to select the closest object to the pointer even though it is not directly over it. You can see the difference it makes in the before and after video above, particularly on the selection of very far-away stars. The stars in the video are simply spheres and much of their size on screen comes from their emissive materials, which make it hard to select if the sphere is only a few pixels on screen.
Knowing that such techniques exist, how to implement them, and the benefit in terms of QoL that they can provide is part of the expertise I provide.
Testimonials and examples of UX content I released on YouTube
Here are some testimonials from other game studios I have worked with, as well as videos of analyses of popular games I have done in the past.
What is a Usability inspection?
In the academic context, the usability of a system can be evaluated by having a software artefact inspected by a usability expert. I apply two main methodologies:
- Heuristic Evaluation
This is an experience and knowledge-based inspection of the UI based on my knowledge of academic literature, game-specific genre standards, and the best strategies or patterns to solve a specific problem. Through this, I will analyse the UI and identify potential issues. - Cognitive Walkthrough
This is a process that consists in analysing a specific UI scenario or interface and answering a set of four main driving questions, about 1) whether users or players will understand how to achieve their goal(s); 2) whether players will notice that the correct action is available; 3) whether players understand which subtasks may be necessary; 4) whether players receive suitable and appropriate feedback for their actions.
How can this help the development of your game?
After having access to a prototype of your game's UI I can perform both a Heuristic Evaluation and a Cognitive Walkthrough. This can range from a simple mock-up in Figma or even on paper, to a fully fledged interactive prototype. The more interactive, the more accurate my feedback can be but I can be of assistance at any stage of the development process: it is far better to identify QoL during the early stages than fix them later.
You will then receive a detailed written usability report with the results of the evaluation, containing the following:
- Detailed information on specific issues that were found
- If applicable, a list steps on how to reproduce the issue
- Motivation on why it is an issue, with references to relevant HCI literature if applicable
- Suggestions on how to improve or alternative designs to consider.
If you prefer to receive the report in another way, such as a live video call, feel free to ask.
What is not part of a usability inspection
- I will not design the UI of your game. While I have designed the UI in my games myself, I am not a graphical designer by trade. I can however identify design issues and suggest how to address them.
- The usability inspection is a knowledge-based report. It does not provide any technical implementation. Though, I am available for consultations based on the specific UI framework that I am most knowledgeable about, which is the UI Toolkit for Unity.
Other examples of UX work I performed
The game I am developing, Sine Fine, is a UI-heavy game. As such, particular care is going in the development of the UX of the user interface. Here are some custom controls I created using the UI Toolkit in Unity.
Interested?
Feel free to contact me at vindemiatrixcollective@gmail.com. Rates start from EUR 50 per hour plus Belgian VAT of 21%.