Level Up Your Games User Research
Whether you’re running your first study, or an established team struggling to increase your impact, build your in-house user research capability with coaching and training from industry-leading expert Steve Bromley.
BUILDING research MATURITY IS HARD
All game developers like the idea of user research & playtesting. But in hectic game development environments, where the deadline for everything is *yesterday* it can be hard to make research a priority.
Your studies are considered too slow, too irrelevant, and are not listened to.
This then leads to being excluded from decision making, understanding players becoming optional or even replaceable by a new fancy AI tool.
All of this adds up to a lack of impact – not to mention unhappy researchers and designers!
Build an impactful research practice
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Whether you are running your first study, or building on a history of excellent research, you can run efficient and impactful studies that inspire game developers.
Use advanced scoping techniques to unlock a regular cadence of studies, closely linked to the game’s most important decision making.
Deploy the widest toolkit of research methods, and be able to provide reliable and efficient data – exactly when needed.
Master advanced analysis and reporting techniques to make sure your studies get heard.
And create a self-improving iterative research approach, to ensure your studies continue to grow and meet new challenges.
Ultimately, create a happy environment for you and your colleagues, and ensure that research matters.
Work with a recognised industry expert
Work with Steve to train your team, provide 1:1 coaching and collaborate on your research team’s strategy – making a effective and efficient research practice.
With over a decade in the games industry, Steve Bromley has helped publishers, platforms and studios of all sizes to transform their game development process, run reliable games user research studies and build a product strategy to combine player data with creativity.
As author of the bestselling book Building User Research Teams, and a recognised Games User Research leader, Steve has worked with studios such as PlayStation’s London Studio, Guerilla Games, Media Molecule, and many others still under NDA, to ensure that research matters.
SUPPORTING YOU TO DELIVER GREAT RESEARCH
From defining your players and iterating your early prototypes to optimising FTUE and retention, games user research will help build internal alignment and unlock confident development throughout development.
Work with Steve to learn advanced research methods, create a self-improving research practice, and build a happy and effective research team.
Qualitative and Quantitative Research TRAINING & Support
Learn how to reliable test your game with real users, and apply scientific and psychological expertise to remove the bias from traditional playtesting.
Learn advanced methods including usability testing, appeal tests, surveys, interviews and other reliable qualitative and quantitative methods to discover what is working with your game, where players get stuck or confused, and de-risk the development of your game. Get 1:1 support and guidance on how to deploy these methods to meet your genuine game development challenges.
“I worked with Steve on a title where we had many thorny issues that only playtesting could aid us to make headway on…He has a real clarity of understanding of how to translate your questions and needs into practical unbiased tests and programs to get the understanding you seek.” Brynley Gibson – Executive Producer at Sharkmob
Coaching FOR INDIVIDUALS OR TEAMS
Build in-house games user research capability with 1:1 or team coaching and consulting, to run research that matters.
Deal with sticky game development situations, such as being ignored, deprioritised or unaligned teams that hinder your impact.
Your team can run efficient user research, that makes a real difference to game development decisions.
“… really helped me faciliate and set up proper playtests to be effective for our developers with as little participant bias as possible, culminating in a smooth and successful release of some of our recent content.” – Michelle P, Fatshark Games
Games UX Strategy
Be confident you are making a game players love, with a player-focused development strategy.
You and your team can achieve predictable production, less re-work, cheaper and more reliable development & confident decision-making from ideation to launch with my industry-leading player insight approach.
” Steve was able to turn my vague questions and hypotheses into actionable understanding based on real user feedback, which is impacting studio business strategies and the games we are making.” – James Whitcroft – former UX/UI Design Director at Rockstar, and Creative Director of Lucky Ghost
UNBIASED Playtest Data Analysis
No time to analyse your playtest data? Let me give you the unbiased conclusions, and create a compelling narrative to inform your development priorities.
“Steve was able to provide an external, unbiased viewpoint which was invaluable to us!” – George Rowe – Senior Producer – Aardman Animations
Book A No-Pressure initial consultation
If you’re ready to improve your user research practice, and build an environment where research matters book a time below for a no-pressure initial consultation.
We’ll have a chat and answer any questions either of us have. After the call, we can decide if working together makes sense.
Kind Words From Past Collaborations
In creating a new games studio, I was eager to understand more about our players’ needs and motivations in playing games. Steve was able to turn my vague questions and hypotheses into actionable understanding based on real user feedback, which is impacting studio business strategies and the games we are making.
Steve was a trusted partner through this process – from research design, through execution and a delivery of a clear summary which is a constant reference point.
I’d have no hesitation in working with Steve in the future, and would recommend him to anyone who has questions about the people playing their games, or wants to learn more about user research for games.
Steve is an expert in his field, and his exceptional manner is very suited to working with a range of clients. I don’t hesitate to recommend him.
Steve Bromley has been instrumental in taking our user research to the next level.
As we approached the launch of our first big title, we had a lot of questions about what our long-term play experience was like. Steve helped us define a playtest method that could answer those questions, including finding suitable participants and figuring out the right questions to measure engagement.
He went above and beyond to assist us and has been incredibly important to our user research growth
Want to give Steve Bromley, UX Research extraordinaire, a giant shout-out.
Our Consumer Insights team is one team that runs a lot of market and ux research and over the last year we’ve had the pleasure of being able to tap into Steve’s brain on a number of occasions and he’s been incredibly helpful.
He has been extremely helpful as we work to support our various internal stakeholders with great research!
Steve ran games usability training for our entire game development team at MindForce Game Lab.
We all found the training extremely valuable, packed with practical guidance and it provided us with the tools and templates needed to run our own usability tests.
We’re looking forward to running more usability tests to ensure our game is usable and fun for players!
Chatting with Steve about sound strategies in the games user research area really helped me faciliate and set up proper playtests to be effective for our developers with as little participant bias as possible, culminating in a smooth and successful release of some of our recent content.
Our team of 7 participated in a half-day GUR remote workshop led by Steve. He taught us how to plan, conduct, and analyze the results of Games User Research studies.
Steve is highly knowledgeable on the topic, a fact our team knows first-hand from working with him on research projects, so we knew the information shared would be reliable and relevant.
He designed the workshop to be hands-on, which kept the team engaged throughout and fostered team building. Steve was great at accommodating our needs, quick to respond to requests and the information he shared with us brought value to all workshop attendees. It was also genuinely fun, as each attendee playtested a game themselves and moderated a playtest for another attendee. In summary, it was a worthwhile, enjoyable workshop and our team will benefit from the insights we gained.
When Gamecity Hamburg was preparing a playtesting session for local indie developers for the first time, Steve’s know-how was a great help. Thanks to his extensive experience, he was not only able to explain basics and detailed insights into the playtesting process, but he also gave the devs valuable tips tailored to their individual needs and game concepts.
Not only the teams, but also Gamecity Hamburg were very grateful for the valuable insights that Steve was able to convey to us in an easily understandable and clear way. Steve also went above and beyond, offering his advice and further materials after the workshop.
We look forward to possible future collaborations
As a company with no one who has formal training in user research and testing, Steve was able to train us to a level where we all feel comfortable and confident running our future tests.
Our work for hire studio struggles to convince clients of the benefits of including user research on projects, we couldn’t be happier with what Steve was able to teach us. Knowing how to communicate to clients a clear and comprehensive process will make a huge difference in our sales!
A very valuable and thorough experience, and it just generally makes me more excited about making games.
Work with games user research leader, Steve Bromley
I am an experienced user researcher, specialising in games user research and building new user research teams.
I work with publishers, platforms and studios of all sizes from indies to AAA to run playtests, and integrate user research into the game development process. I’ve spent over 25,000 hours with players!
Prior to this I was a senior user researcher for PlayStation and worked on many of their top European titles, including Horizon Zero Dawn, SingStar, the LittleBigPlanet series and the PlayStation VR lineup.
I wrote the best-selling 5-star rated book Building User Research Teams.
I started the IGDA’s Games User Research mentoring scheme, which has linked hundreds of students with industry professionals from top games companies such as Sony, EA, Valve, Ubisoft and Microsoft. This inspired my bestselling book How To Be A Games User Researcher which shares the expertise needed to work in the games industry, and has over 50 5-star reviews on Amazon.
Level Up Your User Research Today
If you’re ready to improve your user research practice, and build an environment where research matters book a time below for a no-pressure initial consultation.
We’ll have a chat and answer any questions either of us have. After the call, we can decide if working together makes sense.