usability-testing
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Carbine Studios dev blog details usability testing
Though we still have absolutely no idea what exactly Carbine Studios' next project is, that's not going to stop the studio from talking to us about it. Carbine's Senior Producer, Eric DeMilt, has released a dev diary regarding the ongoing development of the studio's super-secret project. In particular, the diary details usability testing. Players are able to test the game in a testing lab on-site, where the devs are able to watch players as they play in order to gauge their reactions to certain content. Players also are asked to complete a short survey afterward, which provides Carbine with a wealth of valuable information regarding difficulty, user-friendliness, and the overall quality of the game. Mr. DeMilt's full blog post can be read over at Carbine Studios' official site.
The Virtual Whirl: User interfacing
The user interfaces for general-purpose virtual environments get a pretty bad rap. It's not surprising, actually. They've generally been pretty awful. Not that they are actually hard to learn, but they've been far from comfortable to use. That's not really very surprising. Those virtual environments don't really fit any of the accreted body of knowledge of user-interaction models, and building comfortable user-interfaces is no easy task.
