Challenges and Methods in Games User Research

When: Thursday, May 4, 2017
Where: PGH 563
Time: 11:00 AM – Noon

Speaker: Prof. Pejman Mirza-Babaei from University of Ontario, Canada

Host: Dr. Zhigang Deng

Game development requires a deep knowledge of user needs. In addition to leveraging established user research methods, games user research increasingly incorporates a novel combination of methods, measurements and visualizations to better understand the player experience. I this talk, I will provide a summary of my research especially in developing new evaluation and analytics methodologies for usability and user experience evaluation of under-development titles.

Bio:

Pejman Mirza-Babaei is an Assistant Professor at UOIT http://businessandit.uoit.ca/ (Toronto, Canada), where he researches &teaches HCI, game design, and user research. Prof. Mirza-Babaei also is the Games User Research Director at the Execution labs http://executionlabs.com/ (Montreal, Canada). His role is to ensure that gameplay experiences meet designers’ intent, and responsible for user research and playtesting for projects developed at the Labs. He also is active member of the Games User Research SIG and has presented talks and co-organized workshops at various events (including CHI, CHI PLAY, DiGRA). Currently Prof. Mirza-Babaei is co-editing a book on games user research.