Epic Games HUD Redesign

Two classmates and I worked directly with Epic Games User Experience team to investigate the Heads Up Display (HUD) in Unreal Tournament 2014 (UT14).

User research

Using an eye tracking device, we discovered certain elements were barely used by players. In an online survey I created, we found that those elements which were underused were the some of the same elements users rated as most critical. This mixed-method approach helped us triangulate where one major interface issue was.

Design and prototyping

Through iterating ideas and researching releveant literature, implemented novel iconography, created more easily readable data visualizations, and discovered ideal placement of the elements on screen. Initially, we created sketches of a new ammuntion counter and element placement.

I then used Adobe After Effects to animate these HUD design versions over actual gameplay. These videos of gameplay with our new HUD versions were used to simulate gameplay. We tested player awareness of HUD information on each HUD type to see if our design choices were effective.

Testing and results

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 trends. 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).