Tse-Yun Chaung
UX Research/Design
Game Usability Analysis
Mobile Game - Wildcraft: The Animal Sim Online 3D
Photo by Onur Binary on Unsplash
Project Goal
To Assess the usability and the learnability of Wildcraft: The Animal Sim Online 3D.
Time
Nov. 2021
Deliverables
Expert Review, Mind map, Issue spreadsheet and Usability analysis presentation report
My Role
Games User Researcher
Wildcraft: The Animal Sim Online 3D is an RPG mobile game for players to enjoy wildlife adventures as various animals.
Process
Initially, I defined the gameplay's scope to investigate most game features. Then, I determined the usability principle, best practices and the prioritization rule before conducting the review to ensure the identified issues were reliable.
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During the review, I investigated the learnability and usability issues in the first 45 minutes of gameplay and prioritized them based on the impact on players' experience. With these prioritized issues, I analyzed the collected data and grouped them as different themes to understand where these issues have significant causes and impacts.
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In the end, I organized the findings and produced the presentation report as the deliverable to discuss with developers and designers how to fix the issues and improve players' experience in the future.
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You can access the full report of this study here.
Determine Objective and Scope
This project focuses on first-time player experience. To have enough scope to solve, I defined the objective and scope as follows:
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Objective: Assess the usability and learnability of Wildcraft: The Animal Sim Online 3D (Ver. 21.4) on the iOS platform.
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Scope: Investigate the first 45 minutes of gameplay til leveling up the wolf character to L.v.15 in single-player mode.
Choose Methods
Usability Expert Analysis
The review has been conducted by using usability principles and best practices.
The result is a list of usability and learnability issues players may have with the game content.
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Usability Expert Analysis is an efficient way to identify as many basic usability problems as possible before running a playertesting with real players.
Prioritization
Identified issues have been prioritized based on the impact on the player’s experience by using the decision tree from userfocus. There are positive findings and negative findings.
For negative findings, there are 3 severity levels: High, Medium, and Low, based on 3 factors: frequency happened, difficulty to overcome, and impact on the completion of main tasks/goals.
The severity levels of the issues can be considered by the development team during prioritizing work.
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Prioritization Tags for issues with different severity levels
Review the Game & Identify Issues
Play as Real User
Initially, I played the game directly and enjoy the gameplay experience as a real player.
By doing this, I could focus on the content of the game and didn't distract by note-taking or wear any research lens causing any bias.
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Part of Content from the Gameplay Clip
Mindmap Organization
After experiencing the game content as a player, I started to review the video clip recorded in the previous gameplay session.
During the review, I used the mindmap to write down the insights I observed from the clip.
Compared to using a spreadsheet first, I could quickly note the issues and drag them easily on the mindmap, which is more efficient to analyze the data later.
Part of Raw Data from the Mindmap
Analyze Data
Issues with Causes & Impacts
Based on the collected data in the mindmap, I grouped the issues based on their themes or features and used the prioritization rules defined before to tag the priority of each issue.
Furthermore, each issue comes with cause(s) and impact(s), which shows the reasons the issues occur and how the issues affect the player's experience.​
Categorized Issues with Their Causes and Impacts
Key Issues
After analyzing the collected data, there are 5 key issues identified from the usability analysis below:
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1. Battle (Core Gameplay):
The information and feedback in the character status indicator and damage are insignificant.
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Players don't know the character will die due to no meaningful feedback. Unfortunately, the same poor feedback issue also happened with characters lacking stamina.
Furthermore, when players are damaged, many numbers appear together during battling, which can't provide clear information for players.
Issues in Core Gameplay - Battle
2. Map:
The clarity of button icons and the character orientation are unclear.
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Players only know the character's location and have to repeatedly leave the map feature to make sure the direction is correct.
Furthermore, the icons on the buttons don't provide enough information for players to understand their functions.
Issues in Map Feature
3. Quest:
The navigation and the tooltip presentation are poor.
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Players can’t navigate to the correct map for animals on the quest before entering due to a lack of information.
Furthermore, Players can’t clearly see the information when the popup hint and the tooltip are overlapped.
Issues in Quest Feature
4. Menu:
The error prevention and information feedback work inappropriately.
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No error prevention when players accidentally use elixir points and lose their rare resources.
Furthermore, the customized items and the feeding progression bar don't provide enough information and significant feedback when using them.
Issues in Menu Feature
5. Tutorial:
The essential functions are not fully explained.
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The eating function and the attack function use the same button (with the attack icon), which is confusing for players.
Furthermore, the tutorial tooltip of the feeding function only displays once. Players who forget how to use can't perform this function well during gameplay.
Issues in Tutorial Section
Initial Suggestions
Besides causes and impacts, I tried to think of the initial recommendation for each issue. However, the initial recommendation only provides the point of view and doesn't represent the design solutions. Therefore, the developers and the designers will lead the discussion on these issues on what fixes are appropriate.
Conclusion
Conclusion
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There are over 20 issues identified through usability expert analysis, and the key findings in the game are presented in this report.
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7 issues with high priority are found in the game. Most happened in Core Gameplay- Battle and Explore.
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Issues with high and medium priority are mostly related to Navigation in some important features including Map, Quest, and Menu.
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The clarity of textual and graphic information should be more clear such as information in Character Status and Notifications/tooltips.
What I learned
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Avoid usability or scientific jargon in the report/presentation for easier understanding:
The report/presentation is delivered to the developers and the designers intentionally. I focused on the causes and impacts of the issues instead of explaining the research methods in detail. I used the same languages to ensure the communication was less friction and understandable to the audience.
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Opinions are not equal to UX issues:
As a gamer, I used to judge what game content I loved or not based on my preference. However, when I become a researcher, these opinions usually don't represent the issues that affect players' experiences. Therefore, I can now evaluate whether the problems discovered are opinions or UX issues in the game with reliable principles and best practices.
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Next Step
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Arrange a workshop with designers and developers to discuss actionable solutions for the identified issues in this report.
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Conduct a player testing to identify further usability issues from real players once the issues in this report have been solved.
Note: I don't work for nor represent the games user research of Wildcraft: The Animal Sim Online 3D. This case study is a research challenge for me to learn from the product I am interested in.