Characteristics of Experience Evaluation

Experience evaluation is particularly suitable for early-stage design concepts, aiming to compensate for the lack of effective user testing at the beginning of a project.

Therefore, we can begin experience evaluation even when we have the simplest game prototype, or even when we only have design documents and flowcharts.

When conducting experience evaluation, we need to invite personnel with rich, relevant experience to participate in the testing. Typically, this involves experts from related fields or developers who have experience in similar types of development. For example, when performing usability evaluation, we can invite user experience designers, and for playability evaluation of strategy games, we can invite developers who have previously worked on strategy game development.

Compared to general user testing, the results of experience evaluation are more subjective. Experts are not real users, and they assess early game plans based on their past successes and failures. Unlike user testing, where players’ performance is objectively recorded, experts make predictions about the post-development experience based on the design.

Therefore, experts’ evaluations are inevitably influenced by their personal opinions. Despite this, modifying the game based on experience evaluation can help us avoid many pitfalls during the development process, even though it cannot guarantee the game will be more fun.

Although the results of experience evaluation are not 100% accurate, they are highly efficient. An expert evaluation typically only takes a few hours, providing immediate feedback and suggestions. In contrast, large-scale user testing can take days or even weeks, requiring significant player testing, observation, and data analysis before conclusions can be drawn.