While not exhaustive, these questions should prompt teams to identify disparities between design intent and a player’s experience. The principles are presented alongside questions to ask about your audience, to discuss as a team, or to help guide your playtests with players. Addressing them will increase your chances of crafting an engaging, learnable, and rewarding game for all your players by factoring human psychology into game design.

Using these principles as ‘lenses’ on your game can help identify player experience risks, assumptions, and flaws.

Google Play asked us to leverage our experience assessing hundreds of games, to build a set of principles to help you create an engaging, accessible, learnable, and rewarding game for all your players.

We are Player Research playtesting, and user research specialists. The most difficult disparities to uncover are rooted in human psychology influencing factors such as how your player audience thinks, learns, perceives, and interacts with your games. There are many nuanced and player-centric reasons why this might happen. The complexity of this challenge means that despite the best intentions, sometimes the players’ experience of a mobile game differs from the intention of the design.

As a result, developers face the challenge of building games that meet the needs of a wide range of users, while wanting to differentiate their game from the crowd with a great user experience. The audience for mobile games continues to expand globally.

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