Some Feedback Recieved! (USER TESTING)

Its been a while as i had other work to get through and although i recieved my feedback over a week ago i havent had time to update the blog till now, so here we go!

As my target audience was MMO players i had shown a few MMO players (particularly WoW ones) my swf file last week.

In terms of feedback its just some comments i recieved over msn with people telling what they thought was good and bad or where it could have been improved. Everybody i asked to view it all commented on the chat log options that i had incorporated they agreed they liked the fact you could bring up a small menu and change font/font size and the colour as this would be easier in certain situations (for example green text in a forest place would need a contrasting colour in between). My video is maybe not the best example of what you could do with it due to my flash limitations but my video shows the basic idea of what i was trying to achieve and this seemed to be successful.

I was informed that the character status sheet looks a little like the World of Warcraft one, this is actually exactly what i was hoping for. I didnt want to just copy the warcraft one (same color/skin/fonts) but i wanted it to mimic the Warcraft one but in a FF theme so the layout is roughly the same (obviously there are differences in games so not everything can be same) while keeping in theme with the rest of the UI so i take this comment as a compliment. As its the same as the WoW one the person who plays this game immediatly picked up where everything was and what it all meant and would have no problems carrying out simple tasks within game such as changing equipment even though having never played the game before. Also i did choose someone who had never played WoW before and they seemed to understand what everything meant on screen and it was all clear to read and easy to figure out.

This section alone tells me ive achieved what i initially stated in my proposal, I wanted the UI to be easy to pick up for new players with nothing to confuse them, while veterans would be able to jump straight in and adapt to the different game without anything drastically new to learn.

I did have to explain a few things to the people i asked as most of them had never even seen FFXI before so they wasnt sure how much id changed it. The one who had played it before and had quit after a few minutes due to not being able to find anything in the UI and having difficulties with controls commented on how much the battle section in my demonstration was improved. They could understand much easier now that they only had to drag whatever skill they wanted into whatever bar they want and then clicking that hotkey would activate the skill instead of fiddling with macros. I told them if they UI was real they would be able to change each action slot to whatever key they wanted within the options and they was pleased to hear this as not everyone wants to use shift+number keys or ctrl+number keys.

I didnt really recieve anything else worth typing here as i belive my video makes the UI easy to understand so there wasnt much feedback recieved about the overall finished piece and just simple comments such as thats good or that makes sense.

I told them it wasnt totally finished and that i will be making an interactive version of the login system so when thats finished and incorporated ill let a few of them try that.