Game UX Style Guide: Why Do You Need One?

Game UX: “User Experience” is the process of enhancing game user experience by improving the overall application, accessibility and usability of a game to inculcate heightened levels of pleasure in the user. The process is extremely complex and is crucial in the development of any good, well-thought-out game.

UX begins with the basic anticipation, “What do we want to make and who is our player?” This is the first and most basic stage of UX and is called the concept and ideation stage, it is divided into the following sub-tasks: Competitor UX teardowns, Player ‘Personas’, Concept Art Testing, UX Postmortems, Game Jam Playtest and Interaction Design Prototypes. The ideation stage ensures that the game being developed must satisfy a macro consumer’s preference-the game idea must succeed in the market.

The second stage is the Design and Pre-Production stage which aims at “getting it right-the-first-time” and has five salient subtasks: Paper Prototype Playtest, Wireframe and UI Map completion, Usability Playtesting, UX Heuristic Reviews and UX Documentation.

The final and perhaps the most important stage is the Production stage which is concerned with “What do we need to revamp? Where do we focus?” and has six subtasks to be checked: Full Play Testing, Play Diaries, Usability Play Testing, Analytics and Data Vis, Narrative Play Testing and Onboarding. The production stage will make sure that the end product is bug-free, completely operational and safe to hit the markets.

Whilst UX certainly improves the overall holistic experience of a game it is actually the most vital part of any game since UX is what determines conversions for as marketers what we sell is really only experience in the modern world.