In line with the #chi4good spirit, the Games User Research (GUR) field must advance towards demographics that will benefit from GUR, but are currently less well represented. This includes small, independent developers, non-profit organizations and academics that create mobile games, games for health or change, and educational games. This workshop on “Lightweight Games User Research for Indies and Non-Profit Organizations” will be a think tank focused on developing methodological and practical solutions for anyone who creates games with minimal resources.
This GUR workshop is the first of its kind in that it focuses on lightweight methods for GUR, for example, quick and dirty user experience setups and methods, low-expertise requirement approaches or low cost adaptations of eye-tracking methods to evaluate games user interfaces. Ultimately, the workshop serves as a springboard towards building a community of user researchers around the common issues and approaches when dealing with low budgeted projects.
Our goal is to understand, investigate, promote and provide the value of GUR for small companies and –initiatives and any other situation where resources are minimal. We are interested to find out how developers and academics can benefit from existing GUR strategies, tools, and techniques given the specific context of small-scale development; or how these need to be modified, adapted, or re-thought to meet actual needs. This is notably in terms of resource cost, zero training need, high value-to-cost ratio, as well as automation and remote testing capacities. The outcome of this workshop will be a collection of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) best practices, guidelines, tools, and techniques for this target group that are simple, lightweight, and cheap to apply.
The call for participation, details about the workshop and the organizers can be found on the workshop website. Early submission deadline is December 18th and final submission deadline is January 13th, 2016!
We hope to see you in San José in May 2016!