Never too soon to test
We’re still at the beginning of the development of our game, but it’s never too soon to confront your product to real user’s opinion. Testing among friends and family is not a good option. People around you are necessarily biased as they hear about your project very regularly (and for some of them, like, a lot!). But doing a real user testing could seem like unnecessarily complicated for a small start-up, or excessively expensive if you do it via an agency.
Luckily for us, we came across the amazing articles on Techcrunch by Brendan Mulligan on how to easily conduct user testing in house. And we literally applied all these techniques, step by step.
In the method described in the articles, a very important advise is to hide from the test participants that you work for the company. We went one step further and hired someone we knew very well to be the interviewer. In our experience, this proved something very important in order to get a perfectly neutral set-up. And also, in our case, not to have a French accent playing any bias in the process ;-)
We prepared the interview conductor, trying to be as specific as possible on the outcome of the test. In our case, we wanted to test the gameplay difficulty, define if catching the characters was too easy or too hard, get a sense of appraisal to the characters and understanding of the whole concept. Our CEO being one of the most serious geek of Brooklyn easily got us the right camera gear from Amazon.
We also easily recruited participants on Craigslist, based on the criteria of watching TV and playing mobile games. We selected four testers: it’s the right number to get enough feedback if you pay good attention in the recruitment process. More than that means a lot more work with no guarantee of new or valuable reactions: you can read a nice article about that by UX Guru Jakob Nielsen: Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users.
They all were very punctual and very committed to the task. Everything got smoothly and we collected invaluable feedbacks. Some stuff were expected, but some others we didn’t think of them at all, like the Catch TV action. This is one of the first step in our game where you need to capture your TV screen with your phone in order for the game to start. Half of the testers thought it was meant to take a selfie instead of capturing the TV!
We managed to take immediate actions based on this first test, and more importantly, to demystify the complexity of doing one. So, for sure, there will be more coming!
