Game User-Interface Guidelines: Creating a set of Usability Design Guidelines for the FPS Game User-Interface

This study reports on how usability principles can be implemented into a game development framework for the ingame user interface and head-up display. The concepts of usability and how to evaluate for usability were found from literature, usability heuristics (Desurvire & Wiberg, 2009; Nielson & Mack, 1994) provided a structure to carry out the research studies.

The research aimed to explore and interpret how UI features were been designed within current video games and extract findings on whether the UI incorporated usability measure. A collection of first-person shooter (FPS) video games were selected by Metacritic and a selection medium to high rated titles was chosen. The duration of the research period involved playing the selected game titles in week long play sessions. The play sessions generated the majority of the findings, which appear within the final recommendations of the study. The research was taken further where it surveyed a small sample of the target demographic player of first-person shooter games. The findings provided an understanding of certain UI features used with the FPS game that players found the most helpful.