Onboarding playtesting
First-Time User Experience is crucial
The First-Time User Experience determines whether players have a good first impression, and is the most important opportunity for you to provide a firm basis for the principles of how to play - and enjoy - your game. We use dedicated methodologies to examine the effectiveness of your onboarding processes.
These products are best for onboarding playtesting:
Single session playtest
Test first time user experience in a single session lasting from 5 to 60 minutes
Multi-session playtest
Look at knowledge retention and issues for returning players
Competitor testing
Assess the good and bad practices of your competitors during the onboarding process
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When is this most useful?
Use this type of testing primarily to help in the design and crafting of your onboarding and first time user experiences. It will also help you to refine them post-release, especially when you are adding new content and mechanics.
Typical Uses
The findings from your onboarding playtests can help answer the following research questions, along with others that have been tailored to your game and current requirements:
Is your tutorial text readable and easy to understand?
Do players find the onboarding process too drawn out, or too linear?
Does the onboarding process teach them everything they need to know to play and enjoy the game?
Do players want to keep playing after the tutorial?
Are the game’s core mechanics communicated effectively?
Follow-up Questions
PlaytestCloud can run playtests from 5 to 60 minutes for single session studies. Give a generous estimate of time for players to complete the tutorials, and to play post-tutorial as well. This will help you to get a feel for how well players have picked up your game’s principles during the tutorials themselves.
You should aim for at least five players per target group (for example, if you want to test with experienced strategy RPG players and mobile FPS players, test five players in each group). You can run more than this, but in general, you will get more bang for your buck by running more studies with smaller numbers of players.
Only where your onboarding goes beyond the initial day 1 tutorials. Some games take days - even weeks - to introduce all of their game mechanics and modes, so multi-session or longitudinal studies can be used here.
Running a single onboarding playtest will provide useful results, and will help you feel confident that your onboarding works as you intend it to. However, when you set out to build a gold-standard onboarding process, iteration is extremely powerful. Running multiple, smaller playtests that are in line with your development sprints is efficient and effective.
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