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View, browse and sort the ever-growing list of sessions by day, pass type, topic, and format. With this Session Viewer, you can view GDC 2023 session details and speakers, and share your favorites via social media. You will be able to build your schedule and access it during the show via export or Mobile App, once live. Sessions do fill up and seating is first come, first serve, so arrive early to sessions that you would like to attend.

UX Summit: Step Into Your Player's Shoes: Making the Most of Team Playtests on 'skate'

Andreia Goncalves  (Senior UX Designer, Full Circle, Electronic Arts)

Location: Room 2001, West Hall

Date: Monday, March 20

Time: 10:50 am - 11:20 am

Pass Type: All Access Pass, Summits Pass

Topic: Design

Format: Lecture

Vault Recording: Video

Audience Level: Intermediate

Most game development teams regularly playtest the game with the team. For many teams, they’re seen as the designer’s first line of defense, especially at times when end-player testing is not possible or readily available. Internal playtests can be a great source of continuous feedback — but that feedback can be biased. By recognizing this, frameworks can be implemented to help mitigate developer biases and maximize the usefulness of internal playtesting.

In this session, Andreia Gonçalves, a Senior UX Designer at Full Circle, an Electronic Arts studio, will walk attendees through the framework the skate.™ development team has applied to their internal playtesting. This framework, which can be applied to the existing process of team playtesting, has been shown to empower team members to really step into the player’s shoes, to ask for and receive more relevant feedback, as well as to increase empathy, rallying the team around player pain points.

Takeaway

Attendees will walk-away with a practical framework to plan and run more user-centered team playtests that gain team buy-in to solve player pain points—as well as examples of it in practice, and an understanding of the value this approach provides.

Intended Audience

This is for UX practitioners who are looking for ways to introduce or improve UX practices in their team, especially in early/mid stages of UX maturity. It is also useful for any game developers that would like to learn how to get more user-centered feedback on a design from people who are not the target players, when those are not available.