Last Wednesday I was setting up a usability test environment for a new website. Somebody commented on the computer monitor – “It’s fuzzy” – and proceeded to try and adjust the monitor settings.
But, as I pointed out, the target market for the website is students. Our field research has shown that a fair percentage of students are using older computer systems, with crappy monitors and some (shockingly) are still using 28k modems.
So in this case the fuzzy monitor was just perfect – it was a real world environment.
Then, I read today in a BBC report that a “TV glitch mars Xbox 360 Kong game” – simply because the game designers at Ubisoft “used certain settings on high-definition TV screens”.
The obvious questions are:
- Did the Ubisoft designers even bother to test (or even look at) the game within an actual user environment?
- Did they do any type of usability (or in this case ‘viewability’) testing at all?
Even back in the early 90s (when I worked in a television editing suite), we would have a range of monitors – including several of the expensive high-definition Sony Trinitrons – and off to the far right – a cheap domestic 14-inch television set.
It’s a basic requirement of any designer’s toolkit for screen-based media – and in this case Ubisoft have no excuse. It’s the King Kong of stuff-ups.
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