Developing a UX Mindset on Fortnite

[Music] so thank you for uh for being here and uh so for those who don't know me my name is celia and i have a pg in psychology and in the past 10 years i've worked in the video game industry i started at ubisoft in france hence the accent then i moved to ubisoft montreal i worked at lucas arts on star wars games and after lucasart was bought and closed by disney i moved to epic games in 2013 and worked as a director of ux at the studio level on many projects at epic including unreal engine and of course fortnite so this is um what i'm going to talk about when i arrived at epic there was no ux no nothing so as like a team team ux team of one i'm sure you familiar with that and the idea was to build it up um at that time so the idea of having a ux mindset i love to think about ux as a mindset or a philosophy more than a uh like really a

discipline because what's important is to try to place yourself in your players shoes and build up all the the development around it and so to have a ux mindset you have the people with ux and their titles especially people like me coming from a human factors background or cognitive psychology background they're here to bring ux practices they're here to bring over tools and knowledge about the brain and all that jazz and of course you have the people on the core team they're here to build up the experience that they want to offer so designers artists engineers and you have people um so if you have a big a big a team you have people on the marketing publishing side try to define who the user is who's your audience so you can understand better uh what they're after what what they like uh stuff like that so by understanding your target audience your users and the experience that you really want to offer and by having the right tools this is how you have a ux mindset

but to get there it's actually pretty difficult you know when when i'm in a studio they're not used to these practices you have to go step by step and the first step that is important is try to build trust um of course when you enter into in a studio they see coming like a a girl coming from a kind of psychology like a psychologist so you have you have to make sure that they understand that you're not here to impede whatever they're trying to accomplish you're here to help them out and to do that you need to build trust along the way and also you start by debunking some misconceptions so i'm not going to talk about that too much but there like some big misconceptions about ux and coming from the game developers a lot of them are afraid which i can understand that ux will distort the design intentions so sometimes when i talk about ux um i will have like a game developer saying what about dark souls i'm like what about it are you gonna uh

with the uh ux and uh making it usable you have all these games that were you know super hardcore you know change the the experience of these games and make them all easy well no iqx is all about making sure that the experience you want to offer is the one that people experience in the end so if the point of your game is to build a game that is going to be difficult to very specific audiences or hardcore gamers who like to suffer we're going to absolutely help you accomplish your sadistic goals and so that's really what's important to remember that we're here to help you out so that's of the one big thing you need to debunk uh if you're starting a team or not used to ux and what it is is try to really help them out to understand that you're here to serve them and to help them accomplish their goals um there's another big one is like yeah your ex is cool but you know we can you exit later i love how people sometimes use that term as a verb as if you know we can unfuck everything at some point later on um and that doesn't work as

well and so you have you have usually like the team the core team is going to iterate in a closed loop and uh when i see that i say oh you have some prototypes out there like that sounds cool can we can we try them out you know can we bring players over and test it and um there's a lot of not fear but you know the developers are not super comfortable with that idea and they're like no no no like it's ugly it's not ready for testing at all i want to do that and that's happened to you [Laughter] that's something that uh it's important that to understand that it's never too early to test you can't test everything early but there's always something that you can test whether it is the the menus icons uh the systems with dice or whatever you can always prototype something to test it out and if you test it out when it's uh very early on love fidelity on paper before it's implemented and even better before it's added up then whatever changes you need to make is actually

faster and the less costly you do than if you wait um too too long down the line so that's really important to understand and here's an example of the um so you can tell that i am not a ux designer so this is something that i put together to help the the game designers explain uh what their vision about the game because it's also important when you're on a team it's not always about the ux towards your audience your gamers uh the players in the end but also when you're um working in a studio you have to convince your bosses you have to convince the executives that your vision is the right one and this also needs good ux and so this is the sort of things that you know in 49 you have your home base this is what you grow just helping them try to visualize explain what this is going to be about and when we were doing the online testing very very early on we had then a version of what the home base um

was what was the point of the home base later on but it's important to try to have a very low fidelity version even you know if it looks a bit crappy like this one uh just at least to make everybody on the same page and know where we're going um and so that building that taylor relations tailored relationship you know whatever you need right now i can help you out i can help you know explain what you're trying to do i can help test something that you need um at some point during the development of four nights the um lead animator um was trying to understand what made uh the the husk's little zombies more difficult um at times to um to shoot at and uh he had like several like the team had several um ideas behind it maybe maybe the husks were moving too fast maybe it's an animation problem um maybe it is because when because these um these enemies are the the um uh least

now the the most frail ones they're also the smallest ones so uh it's interesting but because they are they're uh the level one monsters they're also the ones are harder to aim at from a distance because they're small so maybe it's that maybe something else and they wanted to figure out what it was about so i asked him can you build you know like a gym level so we can just spawn the zombies and we can ask players to shoot them as fast as possible and we can see what's going on and just reproduce a um the environment typical environment in fortnite so with some obstacles and the zombies will go around it and so this is what we did uh he built a gym level and we tested it so it looks like this uh the idea is we asked players we pretended that there was a contest that was the the ones that were uh having the best score we have the price or whatever so we deceived them and then it's like they didn't know you know we gave them uh um like a

chocolate bar okay um but they're they were good sports with that but they were the idea is to to think that you're in competition and you they had to do headshots as fast as they can as they could and as many as shots as they could so it looks like this there's no sound but i promise you it's shooting um and so you see they're trying they're trying to aim at the zombies um doing headshots and the moments when it's really hard for them is when the zombies are going around an obstacle and so that was really interesting and revealing at that moment it was not you know they there's always like several um possibilities of why why do we have a problem but we really saw at that moment like going like the um the passing code when a zombie had to go around something was really too sharp and so this is when it

was hard for players to follow them so that helped us determining what was the uh the greatest problem there so really trying to be a partner build trust and try to find ways um to test little things here and there and to help the team communicate what they're trying to um to offer was really an important step then the second step is to establishing quick wins you want to show to the core team that a ux process ux mindset is going to help them iterate faster and have quick queens so to to do that the important thing is to lay down they are the main limitations of the brain and this is usually where i start because i want to make sure that everybody understands that we have print limitations players have them we have them we all end the same boat and so we need to understand these limitations so we can correct problems when they occur

so this is just a very simplified over overly simplified diagram of what happens in your brain when you process information and when you learn it's always starting from a perception always starting from an input from your senses then you have information processing happening and in the end if you learn about something new what's going to happen is it's changing something in your brain physically you have new synaptic connections or some synapses are strengthening so the synapses are connections between neurons so physically this is it's changing something in your brain so i'm sure you know all that but when you learn about something it's changing your memory and so during this process there's a lot of factors of course physiological factors biological factors but the ones that i the one i focus on usually is attention because attentional resources are scarce and we know that if you don't pay attention to what you're doing you're less likely to remember it

so attentional resources for our players is really important and i usually also talk about emotion motivation um i'll talk about that a little bit later and so um and again it's overly simplified uh the brain is not this it's a very complex thing that we barely understand um and it's not working in different separate buckets like that um so it's really way more complex than that but just to understand the main limitations that we're facing and to give you an example um for perception i'm going to give you an example from each and show you the one of the limitations and how we can have quick wins once we know that so take a look at this image and tell me what do you perceive in this picture people okay what else yeah just yell it it's fine straightforward okay how many of you see street fighter characters in this picture okay roughly half the room yeah gamers

okay um so it is indeed indeed a representation of street fighter characters by the artist ashley browning and this is really interesting because we're we are at gdc uh we are all game developers we all love games we make games and even then um even if we're like kind of a homogeneous crowd in terms of what we care about and our gaming culture depending on your specific connection with the specific game uh you're not going to perceive this image in the same way and that's because perception is subjective and if you're colorblind like about eight percent of the male population well you left out for them from this example and you hate me because uh i i'm not allowing you to participate so it's also a reminder uh that we're not all perceiving the colors in the same way and so you have to be careful to never convey information only through colors so perception is subjective and it's hard for us to remember especially with vision because we have such that such a

feeling that we're perceiving the reality as it is when perception is in construct of the mind and so it's very subjective and that's a problem because in a game you have a lot of stimuli a lot of inputs that your player is going to have to interpret and you want them to um perceive all these inputs like visual audio all these inputs the way you intend it and because perception is subjective you're not 100 sure that what you perceive and what you design is what players in the end are going to perceive here's an example um from fortnite so that's the reason why we play test a lot so that we can verify what players perceive um can you tell me what you believe this icon from early early on from 2013 represents in the game good job a lot of you play fortnite okay so that's a good answer um this is this was the icon for traps so of course it's

all placeholder and the menu you could see the trap icon so we brought over a few players to play the game because we had already a good prototype for the core loop and um at the end of the session players stop playing and then i show them a few of the icons or the hud and i ask them what is this what is that so i can verify that their perception is matching hours and for this specific icon some players actually did not remember or perceived it as the icon for traps some players told me was the icon for ammunition so if you look at the icon right under the trap one is it all right on there it's small for me to see oh you see the ammunition icon is pretty um pretty close to this one and so it's a problem because now i have an icon that's confusing some players don't recognize it don't understand what it's for and fortnite is not a game where you want to put the challenge on players perception a game like monument valley

puts on the challenge of player perception so that's fine when it's the goal of your game but this is not where the challenge is for fortnite so i don't want players to be confused by an icon especially the trap icon that's one of the main icons in the main menu and it's quite core to the experience of fortnite like being able to craft traps and play straps is really important so the ui designer iterated on it and ended up with a stereotypical representation of a trap a bear trap there are no bear traps whatsoever in fortnite but as soon as we change this icon we didn't have any confusion anymore with the players we tested so even even though for you it seems obvious make sure that you verify that it is indeed obvious for your players all right um another problem with um with memory and i'm sorry i put that very quickly

together i was supposed to have a little quiz here but it's gone what happened um there's a lot of stuff that we when we learn it's gonna be gone uh we're not gonna remember it forever so this is what we call the forgetting curve um from ebbinghaus and the way he did that is he trained himself into remembering some syllables that were not meaningful but he could pronounce it in his language um german it wanted to make sure that it was not meaningful so it was no familiarity with uh the content it was learning and so you learned a chunk of them and then varied the moment when you had to recall them and when it was immediate recall so we just learned them all by heart and like for um maybe 20 i don't remember how many symbols um right after he learned them by heart he has under 100 good answer after only 19 minutes it drops down to around 60 and after a day it drops down um to 30

so that's your worst case scenario but it means that when you learn something that you don't care about that is not meaningful with no methodology of even kind you're very likely to lose about 70 of its content from one day to the next our memory is very fallible um and for not only we don't remember everything and for what we remember it's not accurate and we also have false memories so it's mess we can't really rely on the memories and that's a problem because a game is an experience that we have over several days weeks hopefully months and years so we want to make sure that from one day to the next players are not gonna forget about critical information from them to be successful playing the game and a quick queen about that is to make sure that we remove some memory load um so if you're

not asking players to memorize something then there's no problem they're not going to forget about it because they don't have to memorize it in the first place and so this is the reason why the hud is very important and in fortnite every time you go close to your searchable object you have the the pop-up telling you what key you need to press to search that object you don't have to remember that information we alleviate that load another example is if you're and interested in um crafting a specific item we don't want players to have to remember all the ingredients for that i mean it's boring information and we want them to focus on how to where to find these ingredients harvesting them and then crafting the item that's what's important in the experience not remembering the ingredients so we allow for functionality where you pin the ingredients you pin the recipe in your head so you do not have to remember that so it's important

to keep that in mind to remember that we don't remember well and also again that we're not going to remember things perfectly i usually ask people to try to remember the posture of the uh the thinker from august so you can try that out at home tonight and look afterwards at the result it's really hard to remember exactly on which lay leg or legs lay which arm arms of the thinker because we only have an approximate memory of that so memory is fallible and and it's a reconstruction on the mind so we don't like take pictures and then we can just recover whatever we try to [Music] to store information restore okay and lastly i'm going to talk about attention so i'm going to show you cards and ask you to pick a card and to remember that card i'm going to go fast

all right i bet i can now guess which card you picked and make it disappear like not impressed at all with my trick all right so i changed all the cards and this is a very basic magician tricks uh that magicians are doing and it's called a misdirection of attention in psychology we call that change minus it's our inability to see big changes from one scene to the next and for those who know that these changes are happening it seems so obvious but if you don't know that there are happening in your just focusing on other another information it's likely that you're not even gonna realize that something's going on and that's because our attention is scarce we are not good at processing a ton of information attention is works like a spotlight when we focus on something it's really hard for us to process other information we are terrible at multitasking it's a myth um

and we again like the other limitations we don't realize that this is uh what's happening and so uh in a video game we had a lot of different stimuli that happened at the same time especially in action games which is fine you know we're challenging uh people uh attention but when you challenge people's attention during the onboarding as you're conveying important information for players that they have to remember well then it's dangerous so here um is a iteration that the developers were doing to teach the players how to regen health so back then you had to consume a health item and to try to introduce that to players initially it was it looked like this so the first time the player's health is going below 50 it's blinking and then there's information saying uh hey your your health is low you're gonna need to um consume a health item and then it disappears but at that moment the player is focused

on destroying zombies so it's very likely that they did not even perceive that there was something popping in the hud so you have to be very careful with that we're terrible at multitasking we are not good at paying attention to multiple things at the same time and when players are learning about the mechanics about your controls and everything you have to avoid that to make sure that players can really process the information you want them to remember um so that's what we call the cognitive load theory um venezuela emerge this morning talked about it a little bit but the idea that we if there's too much information we're just not going to process it and players don't read so that's another problem we don't like to read information and so this this was when we're testing a bunch of pvp modes i'm sorry um this was the first iteration man it's always good to have like three items like this is what you need to do

but then there was a lot of detail and cute artwork and so players um we're looking at the artwork you see the eye tracking the red circle they were really focused on the artwork and therefore not reading the instruction and so like being in multiplayer like oh what do i do i don't know and so if you make it maybe less beautiful but more focused on what they need to do and reduce the text as much as you can so then players can bang bang bang try to understand what they need to do so that's something that's also a quick win when you need to change an interface so this is it we have perception is subjective attention is scarce and memory is valuable we have a ton of qualities by going to biases and so we need to make the changes and and fix things keeping that in mind so we can understand where it's coming from uh the third step is to have a common language also it's really important to be able to speak the same language when

there are problems so we can address them and try to find a solution so the language that we established um as i mean the usability part is very established nowadays about to talk about uh fun and all that uh it's it's the finding a way to explain how this works is more complicated so i'm not going to describe all that because um there's ways that you can find all that and i'm sure you already know about it but we have heuristics that rule up some thumbs so to look at usability problems i'm just going to highlight here the importance of accessibility especially since uh keith is not here to talk about it please check this website that's really uh well done it's going to give you a lot of tips to have better accessibility and the second part is engageability which is mainly how to bring fun and immersion and engagement and it's um the the main uh elements are it's motivation

how to motivate players to keep playing and then emotion and game flow uh can support that i'm gonna go fast because i can see that the time is running but from human motivation it's still complicated we don't understand uh very well how it works um so this is like a very quick mapping of the main type of motivation um there's another talk about it if you want to reference it but usually when we talk when we talk about monitoring we distinguish between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation extrinsic is when you do something to get something else intrinsic is when you do it for the sake of it so that's really important to try to make sure that um your players have what they need to be motivated intrinsically and extrinsically and then whenever when it's intrinsic there's a meaning and when they have to do something um intrinsically so it's competence autonomy relatedness is also

meaningful to what they're trying to accomplish and then when you uh survey your players you can use that um to try to find out enough players to get the purpose and the objectives of what they have to do and if it's meaningful to them so this is when you can use likert scares likert scales like this and try to figure out what's going on and if they understand um what what they need to do in the game and later on with analytics so that's you know the the ingredients that we can use the rules of thumbs that help us out but it's also establishing a common language it's really important that's important the qa also knows about it so they can reference back to it from time to time and the last step is process so establishing a process especially around ux testing make sure that we start with hypothesis we not just do ux tests for ux test that the developers participate in it we have a plan we have goals we test the bill that

qa knows what to look for he doesn't know what we're going to test so they're going to ensure there's no bugs for these particular features or systems and then in the end we um we have task creation so there's always takeaways and we're going to act upon several things we discuss with the team of course to define what we want to do what we want to act upon and that's really important to have that relationship on that epic we we have a very great user experience lab as i know there's a few epic people here um so um it's it's pretty cool to see that and to be able to bring people in and to um do that i don't think i'm going to have the the time to go through the rest obviously i didn't have time to time it because i knew that keith was not being was not able to do it only yesterday night so i put that all together but

the main thing i want to talk about here is whenever you find a problem like let's say your player is complaining that the game is too grindy um is it a problem from your design is it like the math that's off or maybe it's a problem in perception because remember perception is subjective and maybe there's something that is misleading to players and make them perceive that something is off um so the example i usually usually take but i'm not gonna have the time to go through it all is with the weak points in fortnite so you have weak points in 49 when you start destroying something there's a little pop-up that tells you um where to aim to go faster and of course the math and the system design is based off players using this and so if players don't know about this and they don't use it then of course they're going to feel that the game is um is grinding and at the beginning the players were not uh seeing this little thing they were just like ignoring it and when i was asking what it is they

were like i don't know so we iterated on it and the um the uam artist changed it to make it more popping out standing out and still the players were not using it so like what the hell and when we were asking them what is this uh players were saying oh this is where i'm targeting uh this is telling me that i'm targeting this element so in the end what the designers did is they um in the pv e mode you at some point you're going to unlock you don't you don't have that ability right away you unlock it in the skill tree so now it's an event now it has meaning and applies like new that's something new and uh after we did that we had way more players that were actually using it all right so um i'm gonna go through all that i'm sorry so yeah i know it's like on the fly so these are the four steps uh if you

want to build a ux mindset in a company uh this is this is what worked for me in the past you start by um building trust uh with the people you're working in so that everybody is sure that you're on the same boat you're not gonna backstab them you're not gonna test the game then show the vps and say oh look at what they're not doing uh you're working with them and you're helping them solving the problems and then you establish quick wins you have a common language and you develop a process so that together you can get there of course it can take some it can take a lot of time this is there's a few maturity models in terms of ux this one is simpler but just just to let you know it can take years to get to the distributed model where we really have a ux strategy um last thing i want to talk about is for um your recruiters to understand a bit

better the different ux rules and sometimes it's a bit confusing because what's a ux designer is it like ux ui i'm confused are these people like making pretty things so it's also important to try to establish these different roles and what they mean and then if you do that uh the last step is really having business goals aligned also with the uh development uh teams and what they're trying to do and the support team so that everybody can um enrich these goals they understand the uh the ui strategy behind it all right that's it so thank you so much i hope it was not too chaotic i don't think we have time for questions because i talk too much um but i'll take questions i'm just gonna say a bit here so thank you again and yeah oh you want a nice question all right go round for the mic

that was a great talk thank you thank you that's very fast um so this is my question you brought up hypotheses and i want to go into that for a second let's say you are a researcher and you have a hypothesis it's a problem i'm working through and you know you play through some content and you have a different hypothesis than the designer who is bias you're also you're trying to build trust but you're also trying to test in a way that can inform the designer that what they see is not the same as what you as a researcher or potentially the players see so there's almost like i want to say um conflict of interest it's it's very difficult to yeah so how do you do it great thank you i'm so glad you asked that question um it can be tricky um sometimes when you build trust you have also to explain to the people you're working with that they have to trust you as a researcher and that you're trained to establish what's the uh the protocol the experimental protocol that's going to be

able to test what they're trying to test and this is usually what i do i'm telling them bring me your questions be me your hypothesis and then uh i'm going to build up the uh experiment that's going to be able to test this hypothesis and when we go back and forth and see if we're aligned but you know trust has to go both ways now you have to do the first step but then you have to make them understand hey you know i'm that's i'm trying to do that so oh trust me does that make sense she's like yeah i was gonna say like sometimes they question how you build the experiment or how you run the experiment that's another issue altogether which i don't know if you want to get it yeah um yeah i mean it's it's never always like super easy um you you can just show them how it works a little bit or concentrate on the other people who trust you and start with them um because then you can establish the quick wins and then it's gonna be easier to convince the others

so if you have that level of resistance start with the people who trust you and understand uh how this works thank you sure yeah i'm sorry we need to i think uh i'm going to be kicked out i'm going to answer questions right after thank you so much i'm sorry for like the last minute kind of thing i hope it was still valuable for you and have a great rest of ux summit and gdc this week bye