We Can Fix That with Data

When people look at web pages, what are they really looking at? Give Eyetools some money to answer the question for you. They’ll do a little study and send you some cool visualizations.

Check out the heatmap, which reports the behavior of many users. The “individual session images” are equally fascinating.

They do all the work at their office. I guess that’s so you don’t get too scared of the tools. Unfortunately, it reduces their outreach into fields outside of web design — like, say, game design.

UI usability is normally totally ignored. If Microsoft is your publisher, they’ll send your game through the Usability Lab (and if you live in Seattle and are suitably multicultural, you can be a tester, too!). If you’re anybody else, you’re lucky if a single designer on the team gives enough of a shit to say something about it.

Eye tracking is important. Minimal eye movement should give the player access to all the information they need for the task at hand (during combat, for example, maybe your power cooldowns and the opponent’s health shouldn’t be on opposite sides of the screen). Unfortunately, without the crazy Eyetools lab, you’re not going to have any hard data on that front.

Intuitiveness is something that you might have more luck with. Is it intuitive to find your character’s inventory the first time you log in? You’d need some way of tracking clicks (log each open-HUD event, for example). Alternatively, send the peon junior designer into the newbie chat channels during the first few days after launch, and find out what people are asking about. They probably won’t go to the boards to say that they can’t find the inventory. They’ll ask in chat and wait for a beta player to answer.

To validate the default UI layout, you need to know how players have rearranged theirs. This requires you save UI options on the server — probably not a bad thing anyway, as it means they don’t have to arrange their UI just right every time they log into a new machine (just be sure you account for potentially different resolutions). You get a mountain of fun data to play with, too.

Option C is doable by just about every average MMO. Why don’t you?