Epic Games HUD Redesign

When I worked at Red Hat, UX Designers on my team repeatedly insisted they weren’t sure who are users were and what they did. Product management would often be forced to make assumptions on the backgrounds of our users when making decisions. I championed this generative research project to form the landscape of our core users in way that would give the team an evergreen resource on how our users behave and operate day-to-day.

The Work

I used Indi Young’s mental model approach: I interviewed users, coded each user interview their atomic behaviors, and then organized the behaviors into themes (see previous slide). This gave a huge map of what users do everyday.

I also used the core behaviors to create personas, using Alan Cooper’s behavioral variable method to qualitatively organize each user into three distinct persona profiles. The persona aspect of this project was added midway through the process to help our audience digest the findings more easily.

The Results

Our work resulted in our mental model map with hundreds of tasks overlayed by relevant personas and three detailed persona descriptions.

These were constructed in such a way that they describe current technology and tools where relevant, but also can be applied as core underlying behaviors when the next paradigm shift occurs (this happens often in software development).

We put these results to work by using them in ideation workshops and helping to rapidly onboard new UX team members.

Reflection

We tested three HUD versions: original, widespread, and condensed. The main aspects we focused on were awareness of the weapon inventory and awareness of the ammunition levels. In all of our measures, our widespread HUD redesign performed better than the original or the condensed HUD redesign. We found that our new placement of the weapon inventory increased the ability to correctly recall which weapons the player possessed.

We also found that adding representative iconography to the ammunition counter and a context-dependent aspect to the counter increased awareness of how much ammunition the player had at a given time.

My team and I presented these findings to the UX team and lead Unreal Tournament developers at Epic Games HQ, and the current design now reflects Click on the video below to watch a live prototype we used in our experiment.

We presented our methods in a conference poster at the SHARC conference.

Red Hat Usability Benchmarking

Our organization identified a need to track metrics of usability across product versions. First, I gathered existing methods of usability benchmarking. I decided on the SUM method based on its ability to summarize classic usability metrics for easier accessibility to non-researchers.

I gathered information from stakeholders on the critical tasks to test and worked with the development team to get an active version to run with end-user participants. To gather participants, I explored and used many different avenues to schedule the specialized subset of Red Hat product users that would be appropriate for our testing plan.

Recruiting proved to be an organizational challenge for our team. I adpated in two ways to make up for the extended time-frame. While recruiting, I made a script in R to analyze the metrics and produce clear plots to represent the data outcomes. This put our quantitative data analysis process up-front, instead of after collection. Second, I devised a cross-team communication plan to share out qualitative insights that could make immediate product impact while quantitative metrics were still in collection.

I reported some of our results alongside a tutorial on usability benchmarking at devconf.us (link to presentation deck).