[font="Times New Roman"][/font][font="Calibri"]Attention Video Game Developers,[/font]

[font="Times New Roman"][/font][font="Calibri"]I’m a graduate student at Full Sail University. Ihave a survey questionnaire for a research project that I am conductingregarding the use of a usability (user interface design) lifecycle whendeveloping RPGs. It should take less than 5 minutes of your time. Your responseand your identity will be kept confidential and we will not share theinformation we obtained with anybody else. It will be used for academic purposeonly and is not for profit. Your response to this survey is very valuable andwill be appreciated. It can be found [/font][font="Calibri"][color="#0000ff"]here[/font][font="Calibri"].Thanks![/font]

[font="Times New Roman"][/font]

[font="Calibri"]Attention Video Game Developers,[/font]

[font="Calibri"]I’m a graduate student at Full Sail University. Ihave a survey questionnaire for a research project that I am conductingregarding the use of a usability (user interface design) lifecycle whendeveloping RPGs. It should take less than 5 minutes of your time. Your responseand your identity will be kept confidential and we will not share theinformation we obtained with anybody else. It will be used for academic purposeonly and is not for profit. Your response to this survey is very valuable andwill be appreciated. It can be found [/font][font="Calibri"][color="#0000ff"]here[/font][font="Calibri"].Thanks![/font]

Took the survey, and I really wonder some of the reasoning behind your questions.

A few of them don't really make sense to me.

The cost effectiveness? Play testing costs practically nothing for a big studio, they can playtesters in games they happen to have lying around; beta testing easily costs tens of thousands of dollars per month. They also find radically different things: a playtest shows what complete novices will attempt to do and is generally designed for the most obvious user paths; beta tests show what those experienced with the system will do and should handle the most bizzare test cases. Which is more cost effective: fruit picked fresh off the tree, or having a team of architects design a skyscraper? That is roughly how I interpret your question.

Your generic term "Heuristics" is awful. That encompasses a very broad range. It can mean distance from what other highly-rated games do, it can mean just tracking and recording mouse motion, it can mean hooking up eye-tracking equipment and logging exactly where a user looks to attempt a task, it can mean having experts simply look at the UI to judge it based on experience. It can mean color analysis, hooking up EKG to their body to study the stress measurements during use, post-use surveys about what they remember as easy and difficult, looking at diversification based on user's backgrounds, the effort users put into solving the problem, and countless other heuristics. A simple survey (like the one you presented) is a heuristic; but so is hooking up full-body sensors and tracking everything from muscle twitches to brain patterns to CO2 in the breath. Obviously the more invasive are unlikely, but the term includes the full range.

It does not account for the degree of usefulness to the developers. The usefulness may cluster at importance levels of 10, 10, 5, 4, and 0, yet we are simply supposed to rank them from most to least.



I've helped with a number of surveys and had training on what to include and what not to include in order to get useful data. Considering what you asked, how it was worded, and the options you presented, I seriously wonder if you have created a GIGO survey. The exact questions asked do not correlate well with the stated purpose.