Designing the User Experience of Game Development Tools

The companion website for the book by David Lightbown

The Second Edition is out now, featuring a foreword by John Romero!

Where to buy

Designing the User Experience of Game Development Tools can be purchased at:

Routledge

Taylor and Francis

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Indigo

FNAC

Reviews

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
"You make game tools. You want to get better at it. This book will make you better at it. You'll see your software and your processes in a whole new light. Buy it, expense it, read it, give it to your coworkers."

Eric Carter

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
"Great summary of every mainstream UX book you could be reading. It's definitely a must read if you're interested in UX."

NeoTeNu

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
"We regularly reference the information in this book at our studio. It has been an excellent resource for helping developers without a UX background understand how to integrate UX practices into their work."

LTD

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
"A really nice introduction to an area that is often overlooked by game developers. David Lightbown outlines why he believes the industry needs to improve the user experience of its tools, with some convincing arguments on why it would be beneficial. He also provides a solid introduction to User Centered Design, equipping novices with a process and a variety of approaches to solving specific problems. Definitely recommended for those with an interest in this niche topic."

Jonathon

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
"Awesome book, loved it."

Mattd1980
Thank you to UI Review for this review of the first edition.

Notes (Second Edition)

Introduction

  1. The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, more commonly known as Xerox PARC, would play a huge role in driving the field of human–computer interaction forward. Michael A. Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning offers a fantastic history of Xerox PARC, the people involved in its rise and fall, and all of the companies that they would go on to influence, including Adobe, Microsoft,Pixar, and Apple.
  2. The full version of this story can be found in Lucy Suchman’s book Human–Machine Reconfigurations. You can also watch an excerpt from the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUwXN01ARYg&ab_channel=PARC
  3. See the Works Cited and Recommended Reading section for a full list.
  4. See the article here: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/video-build-better-dev-tools-build-better-games.

Insert A

  1. The full version of the interview can be found here: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/classic‑tools‑retrospective‑tim‑sweeney‑on‑the‑first‑version‑of‑the‑unreal‑editor.
  2. This is very similar to the User‑Centered Design process that we will learn about in Chapter 2!

Chapter 1

  1. This was originally proposed in an article for the Design Management Journal, entitled “Converging Perspectives.” It can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1948-7169.1992.tb00604.x.
  2. You can read more about Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow’s_hierarchy_of_needs.
  3. https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/Resources/files/GDC2010_Brown_LevelDesignInADay_ToolsMakingBetterGame-2113502943.pdf.
  4. This approach is similar to Scientific Management, often referred to as Taylorism after its inventor Frederick Taylor. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management.
  5. We will learn more about this later in Insert B: Hiding in Plain Sight.

Insert B

  1. We will learn more about chunking in Chapter 5!
  2. The original chess study came from Adriaan de Groot.
  3. You might know them from their study on selective attention, also known as the invisible gorilla video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.
  4. In Chapter 5, we’ll see an example of how chunking can be used to interpret hexadecimal color values.
  5. We will learn more about human vision at the start of Chapter 5.
  6. Here is a video of the study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIF3FRwbG6Y&ab_channel=edz44.
  7. See the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmAwAefKZ8o.
  8. Here’s a link to the blog post for the study: https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement-in-forms.php.

Chapter 2

  1. Or even re‑think them completely, as we saw with the iPhone and iPod Touch.
  2. For more on the ISO 9241‑210 standard, visit the website https://www.iso.org/standard/77520.html.
  3. In fact, Jeff knows a thing or two about the mind. In addition to being a brilliant innovator, Jeff also has a deep understanding of the brain. In 2004, he wrote a book about how we think, titled On Intelligence. Knowing how the brain works is useful when you are designing for people.
  4. The book Effective UI by Anderson, McRee, Wilson, et al. uses a very similar graph to compare the slow iteration of the waterfall process versus the fast iteration of Agile.
  5. In their article “Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User‑Centeed Design” for the Journal of Usability Studies, authors Desiree Sy and Lynn Miller call this “Cycle 0” You can read it here: https://uxpajournal.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/pdf/JUS_Sy_May2007.pdf.

Insert C

  1. Jef also wrote a classic book on user interface design called “The Humane Interface”.
  2. Read more about Jef’s involvement in the Macintosh here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin#Macintosh.
  3. Read the full article here: https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html.
  4. At least, different if you live in North America, which is why the scenario takesplace in California. Specifically, light switch behavior can vary in different parts of the world. This is why it’s important to know what is familiar for your users!
  5. This kind of document is known as a “Pattern Library”. You can read more here about Pattern Libraries and Interaction Design Patterns here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_design_pattern.

Chapter 3

  1. The full video can be seen here: “Steve Jobs on Apple Customer Experience and Innovation,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8n5hCLvuzc.
  2. This comes from the Google company philosophy page, “Ten Things We Know to Be True,” https://about.google/philosophy/.
  3. This was me when I first started making tools!
  4. Malcolm Gladwell discusses this effect, known as the inverted U‑curve, in his book David & Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.
  5. No references to this quote can be found in books, in web searches, and even from the historians at the Ford Museum: https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast
  6. As long as the feature is not a key element related to setting up a pipeline, which could result in a bottleneck for the rest of the content creators.

Insert D

  1. See the talk here: https://gdcvault.com/play/1034261/Improving‑Your‑Tool‑UX‑Design
  2. Read it here: https://inclusive.microsoft.design/tools-and-activities/Inclusive101Guidebook.pdf.
  3. In 2019, Ubisoft’s David Tisserand revealed that a lot of people play games with subtitles on, suggsting that they are appreciated by more than just gamers who are deaf and hard of hearing. Read more here: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ubisoft-sees-high-acceptance-for-opt-out-subtitles.

Chapter 4

  1. The full article can be found here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/first-rule-of-usability-dont-listen-to-users/.
  2. Read more here: https://www.uxtigers.com/post/say-vs-do.
  3. This is similar to the approach that Tim Sweeney described at Epic for the development of Unreal in Insert A, It’s Always The Tools That Kill People.
  4. Note that if these people are working on an unannounced game, you may need to sign an NDA to watch them work. Alternatively, you can ask them to work with assets unrelated to the game.
  5. The action cycle is part of the field of action research, pioneered in the 1940s by Kurt Lewin, a professor at MIT. According to Lewin, humans constantly iterate through three phases when performing actions: planning, acting, and evaluating the results. More recently, Don Norman proposed a “Human Action Cycle” more geared toward human–computer interaction, which features three very similar phases: goal forming, execution, and evaluation.
  6. When the shape of an object suggests how you should interact with it, this is called “Affordance,” which you can read more about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance.
  7. In the example that follows, the design techniques of hierarchy, progressive disclosure, representation, grouping, feed‑forward, constraints, and excise are being applied. We will learn more about them in Chapter 5.
  8. For more on how Nielsen and others define learnability, see here: https://measuringu.com/measure-learnability/.
  9. And we know how important customization is from Insert D: One Size Does Not Fit All.
  10. We will go deeper into understanding learning curves—and forgetting curves—in Insert F: Consistency versus Innovation.
  11. If there are a lot of users, we can use telemetry to identify the people who use it more frequently. Those people are likely to provide us with the most feedback. Also, improvements to the tool will have a greater impact on them. See Insert I: Telemetry: A Game Changer for Game Development Tools for more details.
  12. The concept of User Objects is similar to Object Oriented UX. you can learn more here: https://www.nngroup.com/videos/object-oriented-ux-ooux/.
  13. See their book “Scenario‑Based Design: Envisioning Work and Technology in System Development” for a deep dive on this topic.
  14. Here is a link to the article: https://ocw.tudelft.nl/wp-content/uploads/2_RossonCarrollSBDforHandbook2002.pdf.
  15. For even more information on writing scenarios, see Chapter 4 of the book About Face 4 by Cooper, Reinmann, Cronin, and Noessel.
  16. See Insert I: Telemetry: A Game Changer for Game Development Tools section for more.
  17. For more on the importance of considering the time that the user spends learning a tool, see Insert F: Consistency versus Innovation.

Insert E

  1. You may have seen images similar to Figure E.2 with the labels “Design versus UX” or “UI versus UX”. While there is some debate about using these labels, the main message is clear: No matter how confident you are in your design, you simply cannot know how people are using it unless you watch them.
  2. An MVP is product that has just enough features for the user to be able to use it and provide feedback. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product.
  3. Don’t forget truth about the “faster horse” quote from Chapter 3. In fact, the Benz Patent Motorwagen – created by Karl Benz and considered to be the first automobile – was an evolution of the powered bicycle, a perfect example of the iterative MVP process. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Benz.
  4. The story that Jared tells about eBay is entertaining but also inspiring. You can read the full article here: https://articles.centercentre.com/death_of_relaunch/.
  5. When Autodesk Maya replaced their interface system with Qt in 2010, they didn’t change the overall layout of Maya. All of the major elements were in the same place. This allowed the development team to benefit from a better interface system while allowing the users to keep using the familiar tool that they know.
  6. You can read the manifesto here: https://agilemanifesto.org/, including the “Principles behind te Agile Manifesto” which explains the reasoning behind the four pillars and echoes the advice written here.

Chapter 5

  1. These are all examples from Gestalt psychology, which you can read more about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology.
  2. Just like the examples we saw in Insert B: Hiding in Plain Sight!
  3. You can see the entire presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRFmHNzwbME.
  4. More on that discussion here: https://joshbroton.com/redesigning-the-save-icon-and-rethinking-interaction-metaphors//.
  5. Just like we learned in Insert C: Intuitive equals Familiar
  6. Learn about about Susan Wiedenbeck’s research here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/014492999119129
  7. These standards were originally recommended by the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals. Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Road_Signs_and_Signals.
  8. Microsoft’s recommendations for color can be found here: https://fluent2.microsoft.design/color.
  9. Here is a list of tools from the W3C website to verify that contrast standards are being respected: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/contrast-minimum.html.
  10. The book A Pattern Language by Alexander, Ishikawa, Silverstein, et al. is one of the first books to introduce the concepts of pattern languages.
  11. The guidelines for Microsoft and Apple can be found below. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/; https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/.
  12. In some ways, Apple’s keynote presentations—watched by millions of people all over the world—are a training session on how to use their products. This can have a huge impact on the perception of how easy to learn their products are!
  13. A concept which they all borrowed from the book A Pattern Language!
  14. See the guidelines on radio buttons here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/ctrl-radio-buttons.
  15. You can refer to Microsoft’s guidelines on sliders here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/controls/slider.
  16. Furthermore, when it comes to memorability—the ability to remember how to use the tool after not having used it for a while—users tend to remember the general location of a control first (left side, right side, or middle of the toolbar), followed by the label and/or icon associated with that control.
  17. If the user needs hundreds of cells in a table, maybe Microsoft Word is not the right tool, and they should be using a tool that does one thing (spreadsheets) really well: Microsoft Excel.
  18. Here is an article with a summary of the information: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-limits/.
  19. Note the term “percent-done progress indicators”—at the time, progress bars did not exist as we know them now. You can find the paper here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=317459.
  20. Some research even suggests that animated patterns overlaid on top of the progress bar can make it feel as though it is moving faster! http://chrisharrison.net/projects/progressbars2/ProgressBarsHarrison.pdf.
  21. Microsoft’s guidelines for progress bars can be seen here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/controls/progress-controls.
  22. One of the first uses of the term feed-forward in the context of user experience design comes from Tom Djajadiningrat, in his paper “But How, Donald, Tell Us How.” If you have access to the ACM Digital Library, you can read the article here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=778752.
  23. You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedforward,_Behavioral_and_Cognitive_Science.
  24. Read more about information architecture here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_architecture.
  25. You can read more about Miller’s Law here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%27s_law.
  26. This is likely because it was designed to work with the XAML file format, which uses ARGB.
  27. You can read more about Fitts’s Law here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law.
  28. Specifications for menus and contextual menus from Microsoft can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/controls/menus-and-context-menus.
  29. While the number of options on the menu is limited to eight, commands can be chained together. However, that technique is geared more toward expert users.
  30. We will learn a bit more about the pros and cons of marking menus in Insert F: Consistency versus Innovation.
  31. And we learned how important customization is in Insert D: One Size Does Not Fit All!
  32. You can find it here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/progressive-disclosure/.

Insert F

  1. Which we will learn about in Chapter 6 when we learn about heuristic evaluation.
  2. Read the article here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/power-law-learning/.
  3. Read more about Ebbinghaus here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Ebbinghaus.
  4. We saw marking menus – otherwise known as pie menus – in Chapter 5. They were actually first conceived around 1994 by Gordon Kurtenbach while studying with Bill Buxton at the University of Toronto (which we also learned about in Chapter 5). It’s no surprise that they later appeared in Alias PowerAnimator and Autodesk Maya, two tools that Bill later worked on at Alias and Autodesk. Learn more here: https://www.billbuxton.com/MMUserLearn.html.
  5. This may be why the marking menus in Maya and pie menus in Blender are an optional accelerator and are not required to access all of the menus and commands.
  6. Watching Jensen Harris’s presentation on the creation of the ribbon is a must for all tools designers. Learn more here: https://jensenharris.com/home/ribbon.

Chapter 6

  1. You can read more about Nielsen’s heuristics here: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/.
  2. The NVIDIA Normal Map tool has significantly been improved over the years since this version was released. You can find the latest here: https://developer.nvidia.com/texture-tools-exporter.
  3. You can read the article here: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/.
  4. There are some AI assistants that can automatically do this from your notes. However, you should always double check the results to ensure that they are accurate and that nothing was skipped or misinterpreted.
  5. Learn more about diary studies here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/diary-studies/.

Insert G

  1. Learn more about the history of the daguerreotype here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daguerreotype.
  2. Francois Nadeau gave a presentation on the pros and cons of asset tagging versus using deep learning for asset recognition in this GDC talk: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025813/Tools-Tutorial-Day-3D-Asset.
  3. This talk by designer Rasmus Andersson goes into detail about the surprising complexity of text inputs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76b3c_ssyPQ&ab_channel=Figma.

Chapter 7

  1. I was this person for several games, tools, and pipelines, and—looking back—I’m certain that my opinion was wrong on a few occasions!

Insert H

  1. For instance, the European Union has a regulation on information privacy called the GDPR. You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation.

Chapter 8

  1. You can find a variety of ROI calculators on the Human Factors website here: https://humanfactors.com/roi-increased-productivity.aspx.
  2. Saving $42,500 for 16 people over six months equates to $1,062,500 per year for a team of 200 people.

Insert I

  1. The full version of the interview can be found here: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/classic-tools-retrospective-john-romero-talks-about-creating-ted-the-tile-editor-that-shipped-over-30-games.

Conclusion

  1. You can read the full interview here: https://www.fastcompany.com/3030923/4-myths-about-apple-design-from-an-ex-apple-designer.

Videos

Paulina Morrisson-Fell gave a presentation about the book at a Wargaming.net Sydney Meetup.

Robin-Yann Storm mentioned the book in their GDC 2017 talk at the 22 minute mark.

Photos

Images of the book in the wild.


"Dragonfruit, Taiwanese high-mountain oolong, and a book by @davidlightbown. These are a few of my favorite things." @pattesdours


@GameDesignerJoe's notes on the book


"Ooh... Just bought a book that looks pretty cool... *wink*" @celiahodent

Citations

Here is a list of books and research papers that have cited the book.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/9781315154725/gamer-brain-celia-hodent

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/2018/9085179

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3555858.3555867

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1541931213601320

https://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/36637/

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-40612-1_4

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-58625-0_17

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-39952-2_6

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-58625-0_16

https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=HAXDDAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA145&ots=ny-j7_OB5e&sig=_czC9lwtYa6_x9XZ2KcsjiXKMBU&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://penerbit.stekom.ac.id/index.php/yayasanpat/article/view/304

https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=PwMtDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA39&ots=MP6iCUA1IX&sig=zxg24g3jul0tj3jsEMcWtcxP0UY&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://j-ptiik.ub.ac.id/index.php/j-ptiik/article/view/8447

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-90176-9_59

https://odr.chalmers.se/items/7af5f329-1035-4383-b0e4-7ff6ef359ba4

https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=TxY6EAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA183&ots=BmtIEUW0hJ&sig=-chM2NWMH_HCDDZE454SDHs7KBs&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1433725&dswid=7303

https://repository.its.ac.id/80120/1/07311640000041_Undergraduate_Thesis.pdf

https://repository.uinjkt.ac.id/dspace/handle/123456789/65644

https://ojs.uel.br/revistas/uel/index.php/projetica/article/view/42627

https://eprints.uty.ac.id/5741/1/Naskah%20Publikasi%205140411386%20Mochamad%20Hafidz%20Faturochman.pdf

https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/170212/Emil_Dewald.pdf?sequence=2

https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/IzpisGradiva.php?id=102656

https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/kurgu/issue/59637/859466

Works Cited and Recommended Reading

Here are direct links to the Works Cited and Recommended Reading section from the book.

Guidelines

First Edition

You can still see the website for the first editon here.