Duration: 39:24

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GamesUR is a day-long event of knowledge-sharing for video game professionals leveraging games user research (gamesUR): user testing, game analytics, user experience (UX) processes.


The Business of User Research

This talk will present data that Matt and his Scopely team have collected that connects user research and the financial outcomes that companies need to drive. Beginning with an exploration of UX Strategy at Scopely, and how that’s allowed them to effect large changes in their games, the session will cover the team’s biggest challenge: winning the fight of whether or not the issues we highlight are worth fixing. Matt will dive through examples of players’ early experience, where they’ve affected differences in retention, conversion, continued spend, and engagement that are directly related to the quality of the experience that players report (as well as how usability issues connect to that report). From there the session will cover later-game using random player sampling, and how fixing certain usability issues can result in inflection points in revenue.

This talk primarily focuses on Free to Play, but will provide attendees core takeaways that can be used to argue for addressing UX-related issues and growing their teams, and the logic to perform similar value calculations at their own companies.

From a background in Computer Science and Psychology, Matt entered the games industry in 2008 after receiving his PhD. Since then he has worked for 4 games publishers and taught at the Guildhall. Over the last 2.5 years, Matt has been leading the user research team at Scopely, leading developers and publishers of mobile games. This has provided many opportunities to combine the typically small-sample data of user research with the big data of a live game, and to evaluate how UX-driven changes have impacted both the audience and the business of the games.