Feature: Scotland gets a SOUL

The University of Abertay Dundee set up the International Centre for Computer Games and Virtual Entertainment (IC CAVE) in late 2000, in the wake of some innovative teaching in the field of games technology and design.

Part of IC CAVE's remit was to attract games usability work from the international development scene and the centre was already building a profile when the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) weighed in with funding to help in the development of SOUL: the Scottish Usability Lab.

And now SOUL has arrived. The lab was launched at the end of October with a usability event for the local games industry, technology companies and academics. In charge of the keynote talk and unveiling the SOUL plinth was Andrew Swartz of Serco.

His talk was called: "Customers just muck everything up" and he began in the same cheeky vein: 'When I worked at Apple, we developed so many products that customers were never bright enough to take up.'

The following message was powerful. After discussing the history of usability, when first too much in-depth research was attempted and then too much credence was given to what users could design for themselves, he reviewed the place of usability now.

He identified 10 company arguments for embracing user research, concluding with a simple message: if you are fighting for a first foothold, then quality is better than quantity, early is better than late (don't wait for a prototype) and something is better than nothing.

Swartz' reasons for supporting usability beyond mere better design were:
* Getting a team to meet an early milestone: provide focus and get a team started with a common vision by setting an early target to get users in;
* Eliminating unnecessary features: use your competitors' products as prototypes of your own and see what you don't have to emulate;
* Preparing for a new country: the more emotionally or experentially driven the product, the more likely cultural issues will impinge;
* Using UCD techniques to lower risks;
* Uniting a team: almost for the theatrical experience, bring in users to watch and arguments fade away during the day as people get some perspective;
* Redirecting an entire project: if people get a prototype to evaluate they will respond at the level of UI features, but if they get an idea, they will accept or reject a more fundamental aspect;
* Helping bring down competitors;
* Making outsourced developers accountable: quantitative metrics based on user testing could hold development teams to account for your ultimate project goals;
* Manipulating your users: understand how to direct users' attention; and
* Increasing opportunities for creativity: resist market research findings and conservatism with actual user information, free designers to experiment by finding out which lo-fi prototypes are popular.

His talk was followed by some comments from Jim TerKeurst of IC CAVE who said that SOUL was committed to 'developing Scotland's digital industries infrastructure' and that the ERDF funding meant that they would even be able to offer discounted work for some Scottish areas in the east.

Lucy Joyner of SOUL delivered the other talk of the day, on cultural sensitivity, motivation and games design. (See the Usability News stories on her research here: Enjoyability and how People choose what to Play) She put the focus upon the nature of gamers – not anonymous users but people in activity, in a particular context, she said. And she talked about the differences between Japanese, Korean and British requirements in games design – in the process, explaining how a hit game in Japan was never released in the US because it might have been considered deviant.

There was a break in her presentation for a short workshop, during which teams attempted to design culturally sensitive toys for children in the Indian, Chinese and Icelandic markets and discussed the appropriateness of their designs with representatives from each country. Then Joyner continued.

The tension in games design, she concluded, existed between understanding and designing for specific markets and producing solutions that could be distributed more broadly. The development cost of many games means that they needed to sell 1M copies to break even, and so they must sell globally while appealing locally, she said. SOUL would be assisting companies to get this balance right – not only in terms of content, but in terms of the acceptability of the concept. And people 'could end up designing games that' they personally 'don't like,' she concluded firmly.

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