Vertical Slice gave a presentation at UX Brighton last night, entitled “User Research and the Future of Gameplay Experience Design.” We had a great audience of UX and games industry professionals. It was fantastic to meet you all and chat after the talks.

Topics included:

• The traditional development lifecycle and role of Quality Assurance for functional bug testing.
• Differences between QA and usability / UX.
• Risks posed when developing for new IP, audiences, distribution methods, controllers and interfaces.
• Problems with doing testing in-house, and using industry professionals or hardcore gamers.
• Our new best practice development lifecycle and early, iterative testing.
• The use of biometrics such as EEG, EMG, GSR (EDA or EDR) and HR (EKG or ECG) for tracking players emotional states including excitement and boredom.
• Our new methodologies for predicting review scores based on user testing.