User experience (UX) and cognitive science are becoming trendy in the industry, but how can these disciplines concretely help a team develop and improve a video game? UX and cognitive science combined are at the service of the intended design, and can provide very concrete and easy-to-use tips to anticipate and solve problems, sometimes even before the playtesting phase.

This Masterclass proposes to delve into how the human brain works in terms of perception, attention, and memory (critical elements for UX) and offers a UX framework to use cognitive science/psychology knowledge and UX guidelines during the different development stages. The ultimate goal of this Masterclass is to provide tools to significantly improve the experience of the game you are developing, as perceived by your target audience. This Masterclass will offer numerous examples, from video games and beyond, to illustrate each point.

Content

This Masterclass has about 6 hours of content total and has 2 main parts. The content can be adjusted to skip some elements while diving into others more, depending on attendees’ requests.

Part 1 - (2.5 to 3 hours) Introduction to cognitive science and psychology to understand how the brain works and, more specifically, how it learns. We will look into the capabilities and limitations of human perception, attention, memory, motivation, and emotion, using multiple examples taken from video games and beyond.

- lunch break -

Part 2 - (2.5 to 3 hours) Focuses more specifically on the User Experience (UX) framework you can apply when developing your game, and how it relates to the brain capabilities and limitations. We will breakdown UX into ‘usability’ and ‘engage-ability’ and detail the important principles within these 2 components that can make, in the end, a great difference for your player and how s/he will experience your game (for the better!). It will cover how to successfully onboard players (i.e. first time user experience over, roughly, the first minutes to an hour of play) as well as how to keep players engaged over time.

Part 3 (if time permits - 15-30 min) briefly talks about user research and analytics, and how to measure what when, depending on what stage of development a project is at. This part also touches on UX strategy and how to develop it both at a project and studio level.

Audience

Anyone can benefit from knowing better about the brain and about user experience. This Masterclass will however benefit game designers, artists, gameplay programmers, and junior UX practitioners even more.