62. Taking Action - Schedule Your First Playtest
What To Do Now?
What now?
The main goal of this book was to motivate action by removing the main barriers to running a usability playtest - having core knowledge, a clear process, and reducing cost.
You can run a playtest yourself, you just need some practice, but you can’t get that without actually doing it.
Encouraging Action
Arrange a gathering of your team to discuss playtesting at your studio. Some things you might want to cover:
Start by describing what usability and playtesting are (education). This comes from the ‘primer’ sections at the beginning of the book. Encourage people to ask questions, this is a good time to correct any myths or misconceptions around usability and playtesting. Teaching what you know is a great way to really engage with the material, if you’re going to inform others, you’ll have to understand it first yourself.
With knowledge shared on what usability playtesting is, move on to why it’s worth doing it. This book has taken the view that playtesting is more than just getting feedback on the game, it is also an alignment tool for the team.
Present a summary of the 7 step process for how to do a usability playtest. Reading through the Vivid Description (#16) should help people clearly see what goes on.
Now it’s time to ask the team some questions:
“Can we do this?” - assessing the team’s thoughts around the feasibility of running a playtest.
“How might things change for the better if we do this?” - this is a chance for the team to paint their own vivid description of how the studio could be better.
Now the final question to ask:
“Can we set a date to try our first playtest?”.
It is hoped that the answer to that last question is “Yes” and a firm date is proposed. Even better is people might volunteer to help put things in place - maybe someone will take on player recruitment, someone else might handle technical setup etc., the team will work together to make this happen.
If however, resistance is shown to doing a playtest, what then? We’ll look at this next.
Key Takeaway
This book aimed to remove the main barriers to doing usability playtesting, now it’s time to turn knowledge into action. Get your team on-board by sharing knowledge of usability and playtesting and how it can help the game and team. Set a date for your first playtest.