The go-to resource to learn UX and UR basics!

Written by passionate professionals and researchers in the GUR community as a handbook and guide to everyone interested in user research and games.

About “Games User Research”

This book is focused on providing the foundational, accessible, go-to resource for people interested in user experience (UX) and user research (UR) in games. It is a community-driven effort—it has been written by passionate professionals and researchers in the GUR community as a handbook and guide for everyone interested in user experience, user research, and games.

We aim to provide the most comprehensive overview from an applied perspective, for a person new to GUR, but which is equally useful for experienced user researchers. We stress the term overview — GUR is a deep, interdisciplinary field with thousands of professionals working within it worldwide; hundreds of scientific papers are produced on the topic every year.

It is not possible for one book to provide everything you need to know about GUR, but what a single book can do is provide the bird’s-eye view, introduce the contexts and methods, and provide a pathway for further self-illumination. That is not to say that this book is not practical, as the various chapters not only describe high-level concepts, but also how to work in practice with GUR methods. This book contains practical guidelines on how to conduct user research across topics such as planning, methods, lab design, mobile games, accessibility, budgeting user research, and more.

The book is grounded in the design and development process, and describes which methods we use at which stages, mimicking the glossaries used in the industry and academic research today, but putting everything into context. The connection between the wider context of GUR and the nitty-gritty details of work ‘in the trenches’ is perhaps the most valuable aspect of this book.