Post

Players are also sorted into various systems depending on their actions, which then changes what exactly they are able to more accurately within the games' systems. So a positive reinforcement of how they prefer to act.

They have seen impact through this, for example with 7374 custom notes to hospitalized children, reposts by influencers, and other IRL impacts through the game.

And that's it for the first day of the Game UX Summit! There were also loads of coffee breaks and a great lunch in which a lot of conversation happened. You can sign up for updates on the next @gameuxsummit.com event, so you can visit the next one yourself: gameuxsummit.com/newsletter

Day 2 of the Game UX Summit starts now! And the first talk is about internal TOOL DESIGN! Let's gooooooooo

Classic issues that colleagues say about internal workflows: It works, but it's too complex. It's hard to use. It is not visually appealing. It feels overwhelming. The flow is hard to follow. And more.

User research is critical for improving internal tools. You have to know who is doing what, when, and why. You cannot make proper improvements without knowing what the issues are. Seems basic, but is often still forgotten.

Especially because Tool Design is still a nascent field, most tool engineers have not worked with a designer before. So, they expect you to perform magic right away and 'do your design magic' to remove problems right away. This is unrealistic. You have to do research first.

88% of their userbase used the tools on a weekly or daily basis. So improving the internal tools is a huge boon to the entire company.

You have to observe, listen, and ask your users about issues. This gives you a huge amount of data to work with. For example segmentation, flow, hidden pain points, insights, and iterative optimisations.

Flying through great examples of improvements here! Check the recording on youtube once it goes live on the @gameuxsummit.com channel. Every upgrade wasn't just visual, but an active improvement to daily workflow.

Cross studio at Ubisoft, the amount of people that use the internal tools is immensely huge. 20000+ products, 1600+ games, these tools get used all over. This makes it difficult to find a mapping of how users use these tools, where the complexity is, and finding patterns.

Example of product names/tags, being organized in different ways Makes it very hard to find what you need.

The solution here was hard work: Going through loads and loads of games, understanding how they are set up, so the tool designers can understand how names and tags should be organized. So you have to understand the content the tool is for, otherwise, how can you design a better workflow?

And with that new naming structure, it also became much easier to design new workflows. Because now the tags could more easily be used for filtering and organizing. So the foundation of proper research and design makes future work much easier.

(hell yeah dude)

New problem space: Discussions between release managers and external partners. This involved many emails. Issues were: Huge risk of human error, inefficient repetitive work, and so much time. So how about instead of manual emails, there is a new service?

Again lots of great stuff here to catch on the recording, essentially the gist is: They created a clear step by step system, with clear status on each step, for everyone to look into at any time internally. This removed manual emails, missed information, and status became clear.

Another issue: Internal Ubisoft folks get free games to play. Nice! But getting them was problematic. There were a huge amount of support requests all the time! It was causing way too much time to resolve, and users kept having issues. It seemed straightforward. But it wasn't. A design problem.

Classic design process: Go over it with colleagues. Figma up some different workflows. Find out what works and doesn't work. Remove clutter and options which are not critical for user flow. And then, with the new design, ran through it live with actual employees over a call. And it worked!

This cut down the support ticket load by 50%, and improved the process overall. So, for takeaways, start with empathy, identity complexity, streamline flows, guide user actions, and so much more.

What Mike wants to put forward is certainty in a place that he often sees as uncertain.

Could you make game design as certain as physics, chemistry, and biology? Could you as effectively describe what rewards you can give players, with certainty?

That would mean creating theories for many things that we currently do, such as: Fun, Matchmaking, UIs, difficulty, retention, rewards, and accessibility. We are good at post-launch rationalizing, but can we predict what happens before that?