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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.

Next, Mike Ambinder is talking about the science of Game Design. It is about using scientific approaches to confirm or disprove the decisions you have made. He sees science not at odds with design and art, but to help assist it.

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?

This would require frameworks that allow us to gather this data, compare, contrast, and share knowledge. Of course, the usual barriers would stop us: Time, and money. But wouldn't it be worthwhile to do this work, and create more certainty?

Valve tried some of this. The reason DOTA 2 has items to trade is Valve wanted to see if the item economy from TF2 would also work in DOTA 2. It was a research project, comparing and contrasting. Creating theories.

Another example: ELO distributions: Luck vs Skill vs Combination. There is data, so gather it, compare it, create theories, put them to the test.

Other data you can gather, through surveys: Quality of match, quality of teammates, Quality of yourself. By adding that last question, 12.5% of millions of complaint reports went down, because it made players realize that sometimes, they were a problem themselves. So they would try to improve.

Next: EEG or Not EEG, for World of Warships testing.

They found out that experienced players would customize the UI (hell yeah) to expand the radar minimap. And with tracking they found that new players navigate by looking at the world, but experienced players navigated by looking at the minimap.

With EEG they compared how active players were depending on what ship they use. Battleships, cruisers, destroyers, carriers. So they can see the actual boring vs active parts the players experience, with real brain data.