How Studying Video
Games Helped One
Team Design A
Stronger Product
IEEE STC 2014
Brian Scott Walker
User Experience Designer
Chris Heckler
User Experience Designer
Introduction
• I am a User Centered Designer for Northrop Grumman
• I play video games at work
• Here’s what to tell your boss so you can too!
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User Experience needs Commercial Research
• Includes Academic, User, and Commercial Research. This talk is
about Commercial Research
• Commercial Research can help influence design by providing insights
to various ideas, knowledge and methods from other disciplines and
design practices
• Explore already documented solutions to similar design problems
• Gain familiarity with the user’s mental model
• Guidance for best practices to design approaches
Research can help shape your initial design efforts
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Why Research Video Games?
• Military domain – users have played video games
• Games have complex tasks with lots of variables
• Games have to convey situational awareness while reducing
cognitive friction
– Less time struggling with controls and figuring out what’s happening
– More time making decisions and actually playing
• Visual design must strive for simplicity and elegance
• For commercial success, games have to be fun and easy to
understand
• Some games have relevant workflows and design patterns
Game design focuses on reducing obstacles to understanding
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Problems of This Commercial Research
• You look really strange carrying a Playstation 3 into your office
• Email about sounds of alien battle cries from conference room
Get your boss’s permission in writing
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How We Conduct Commercial Research
• Establish objectives for research
• Find relevant commercial software
– Find relevant workflows
– What kinds of information needs to be conveyed
– What kinds of design elements will you use
• Display for a group setting
• Generate research artifacts
– Take notes
– Screenshots with callouts and explanations
– Documentation of impact on design
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The Scenario Generator
• Missile Defense
• Protect a series of prioritized assets from incoming missiles
• Maintain a network of sensors, launchers, other units
• Legacy System
– Legacy system was green dots on black monitor with tubes
– Trainers must create simulations for new warfighters, and for embedded warfighters
– Trainers were used to hand typing threats coordinates and way points in individually
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Our Initial Findings
• Army training domain
– Training must be as realistic as possible
– The working environment must resemble the real world
– Training should be more difficult than the actual fight
– Established and Improvised scenarios
– Performance must be evaluated and graded
• Our initial findings were gathered by interviewing a group of
Subject Matter Experts (SMES)
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Our Research
• Identify commercial software with these activities
– I pick a location for my trainees to defend
– I pick the enemies
– I pick and configure the friendly defenses
– I add any necessary complications to the scenario
• Real Time Strategy
• Tower Defense
• eSports for reviewing performance
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Strategy Games Workflow
Strategy Games
Military Scenario Generator
• I pick a map
• I pick a map
• I pick which army I want to play as
(Human / Alien / Orc)
• I choose the enemies
• I determine which army I fight against
• I establish enemy positions
• Start the game
• I decide what defenses trainees
will be able to access
• Build a base to provide troops with
different types and capabilities
• I start the simulation
• Send troops to attack enemy player’s
base
• My threats will attack the
trainee’s defenses
Games about armies can resemble real army workflows
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Starcraft 2 – Game Lobby
A = Affordance, W = Workflow
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Starcraft 2 – Structures on Valid Terrain
A = Affordance, F = Feedback
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Starcraft 2 – Range Rings and Score Card
A = Affordance, E = Expectation, F = Feedback
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Tower Defense
Tower Defense Game
Military Scenario Generator
• Pick a level or map
• I pick a map
• Level comes with a set of
enemies who come in waves
• I choose the enemies
• Pick which Defenses you want to
use
• Allocate Defenses around the
map accordingly
• Enemies start their approach
• Enemies rush your Defenses
• I establish enemy positions
• I decide what defenses trainees
will be able to access
• I start the simulation
• My enemy threats will attack the
trainee’s defenses
Games about armies can resemble real army workflows
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Orcs Must Die!
A = Affordance, E = Expectations, F = Feedback
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Orcs Must Die!
A = Affordance, E = Expectations, F = Feedback
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Grading and Evaluation
• Dungeons and Dragons
– A Tabletop game – players use pen, paper, and dice
– Build characters who explore a world, fight monsters
– Game is run by a Dungeon Master
• Creates the world and sets obstacles in the player’s journey
• Has to be a way for players to win, and to lose
• Improvises scenarios
• Maintain the challenge to meet the player’s needs
• Conclusion - Modifications on the fly
– Easy to spawn new threats
– Modify existing threat attributes
– Generate faults in friendly units
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Controls just for the Trainer
• eSports – watching video games as if they were pro sports
– Videos of tournament play
– Display performance metrics
• Actions Per Minute
• What resources are consumed or wasted
• Conclusion
– Timeline of what’s coming up in the simulation
– Can annotate, create bookmarks as the simulation proceeds
– Record important attributes and metrics of performance to aid in review
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Impact on Our Designs
• Benefits of research in earliest designs
• Designs showed best practices from successful commercial software
• SME feedback supports our findings
• Early prototype verified by actual users
• Designs inspired by video games are being implemented into the final
product.
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Our Designs with Game Elements
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Results of this Success
• Our team continues to conduct Commercial Gaming Research
– Capturing video, not just screenshots
– Annotating findings with more documentation
• Customers requesting our research artifacts
• Building a library of research artifacts and findings to share with team
members who don’t come to research days or don’t play games
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New Research Artifacts
Callouts can provide context and detail
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Acknowledgements
• NG UX Team
– Stacy Spencer
– Tom Jensen
– Ron Davenport
– Richard Perigo
– Andrew England
– Dave Stone
– Chris Heckler
– Mark Weir
– Neta Ezer
– Drew Schott
– Peter Shimpeno
– Mike Askew
– Rick Segrest
– Matt Hales
– Joan Dodson
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• NG UX Team
Abstract
• MOTIVATION – A scenario generator requires a complicated work flow to simulate a battle as
realistically as possible. Complicating the work flow to build a scenario leads to an ineffective training
program, which makes warfighter training less productive and more time consuming.
• SOLUTION – To design an intuitive approach to a complex task model we studied relevant design
patterns from video games
• METHOD- We identified game genres and elements of game play that would be relevant to the
problems we were trying to solve with our designs, and found games in the strategy and tower
defense genres to inform our product. We took notes, documented the relevant design patterns,
recorded our findings, and showed our findings to SMEs to confirm their validity before building a
prototype.
• RESULTS- When we presented a prototype of our designs to actual warfighters at a usability study,
they responded positively to the designs. We had anticipated their needs, and built a design around
how they do their job while addressing their major points of concern.
• IMPLICATIONS- The positive impact of conducting this research suggests other projects would
benefit from similar research.
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Author Bio – Brian Scott Walker
• Member of the NG User Experience team for three years
• Graduate of the University of Alabama at Huntsville
• Bachelor’s Degree in Graphic Design with a
• Minor in Human Computer Interaction
• Plays a lot of video games. Sometimes at work.
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Acronyms
• NG = Northrop Grumman
• SME = Subject Matter Expert
• UX = User Experience
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