Helping researchers level up
For my MSc dissertation project, I worked with games user researchers to design and build a repository of questionnaires. Questionnaires are a staple of video game research, as they help to gain qualitative and quantitative insights into gamers’ experiences. However, there are hundreds of questionnaires out there, and it can be very difficult for novice researchers to access and evaluate them for their project fit and reliability.
To understand the current landscape of games user research and which questionnaires are available, I conducted an extensive literature review. This also acted as a benchmarking exercise, as I tried to find similar existing experiences and collated experience reports from academic researchers.
This exercise revealed a huge gap in the experience for novice academic as well as industry researchers.
Speaking to researchers allowed me to ask more probing questions about their previous experiences with finding and applying existing questionnaires in their own projects. From this I was able to compile functional and non-functional requirements.
Lack of competition.
As there were no direct competitors or existing prototypes, I had a blank slate to draw on. I started with the key pieces of information my interviews had surfaced - the relevant features of questionnaires that researchers were looking for to make a quick judgement call on whether a given paper or questionnaire would be useful to them. A table seemed like a good starting point, as it would allow for direct comparison and filtering of characteristics.
Does it work?
I love using Balsamiq to help me think conceptually about various features and content that I need to fit onto a screen. It’s like a paper prototype that I also don’t mind putting directly in front of a colleague or even a user to get some quick feedback, and that’s what I did here. I tested this with more games researchers and got tons of valuable feedback:
the table corresponded to expectations, but the information on it only partly
users were confused by the icons, but valued what they were highlighting
the glossary was considered helpful, but needed to be integrated better into the browsing experience
The new version was tested again, with much better results.
Due to the limited nature of this project, some features were omitted, such as filtering on the table or a general search functionality on the site. These were added to the backlog and can be included in future iterations of the database.
In addition to the design, I also compiled content for each of the questionnaires and handed this back to the academic working group, who are now looking to actually code up the website for use by the community. It would be helpful to test further, but given the current state of questionnaire research, this project will already make a huge difference in the lives and research process of vide game researchers.
