It's not so common to have articles in Gamasutra about usability testing in video games. That's the case this week with Better Games Through Usability Evaluation and Testing by Sauti Laitinen.

The focus of this article is not only to tell why usability is important in games, but also to introduce two usability methods and the kind of results they yield. The methods are expert evaluation and usability testing.

It will be presented how these were applied in the development of Frozenbyte's Shadowgrounds (www.shadowgroundsgame.com) game. Adage Corporation (www.adage-usability.com) was responsible for the usability related activities in the project. Before moving on to the methods, the game will be presented briefly.

Why do I blog this? I am a regular user of usability tests to get insights about how people use specific games. The good point of this article is that is shows this can be applied to video game, exemplifying it with concrete examples. Connected Pasta people interested in this should also check the games user research page which proposes interesting and relevant references about this topic.