Entertainment and leisure

Xbox 360, launched in late 2005, incorporates live online gaming with a new system for rating and matching gamers called TrueSkill (link).

Feedback from online forums suggested some gamers couldn't work out how TrueSkill was rating their performance and matching them against other players of similar calibre.

Microsoft asked us for the understanding they needed to rethink the visualisation of TrueSkill for Xbox 360 so it makes more sense to gamers.

We shadowed gamers playing competitively and asked them to tell us stories about their best gaming experiences, what motivated them to play 20 or more hours a week, and what put them off gaming. We also explored what gamers knew about TrueSkill and how misunderstandings arise.

We analysed how rating and matching influences the pleasure and satisfaction that players get from their Xbox games. We found that:

• Players must be evenly matched to create uncertainty about who will win .
• Ratings can objectively measure how a player is improving.
• Players want to progress more than win all the time.

We also identified how the representation of TrueSkill ratings was confusing gamers about the matching system.

We made detailed recommendations to the Microsoft UI design team. The designers created paper prototype screens to show clear and user-centred ways of visualising TrueSkill's principles.

We ran a series of paticipatory design sessions with groups of gamers to gain their expert feedback and input to the prototype screens.

We recommended refinements to the new TrueSkill visualisations to help gamers get the best experience.
 

"new experience are sensitive in their research methods and gave us a deep understanding of how our users experience Xbox 360. They have helped us deconstruct the challenge of TrueSkill and given us the insights we need to enhance the gaming experience." Professor Richard Harper, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research, Cambridge UK