During October, we conducted a series of qualitative user tests on an Alpha version of World Hockey Manager. Five players were chosen to test the game, using a ”think aloud” method, to ensure that all their impressions, reactions and thoughts were communicated as freely as possible. We now have the results of these tests and are making adjustments before the soft launch, focusing on three primary areas.
Handling lineups
We have experimented with a classical list view, which gives an overview of all formations, and an alternative view where the team members are boxed in bigger frames. The list view is common in most manager games, whereas the alternative view is more common in other games. The tests showed that the preferred view is the classical list and it will therefore be used as default mode in the game. The
alternative lineup view will be available as an option. We will also make adjustments to make it easier to change positions of the team players in both views.
Stronger profiling of players
As mentioned earlier, all players will be fictive, which offers new possibilities as well as challenges. Since the game is built to handle tens of thousands of new players in-game, using real life hockey players as characters was never an option. Instead of having thousands of Sidney Crosbys, each player in the game will be unique both by name and value. We are now working on making the players as differentiated as
possible, by enhancing jerseys, countries, shapes and attributes. Coaches, trainers, medics and other personnel will have facial features.
Clearer CTA before games
The core of World Hockey Manager is the daily ranked game, which decides the user’s position in the ranking and is the ultimate receipt of the club’s actions. The user tests imply that we need a clearer call-to- action before the ranked games, so we will focus more on our pre-game center, with more detailed comparisons between the teams as well as more prominent countdown clock.
As a whole, the game was very well received and the test panel contributed with a lot of useful feedback. Our next step is to test a beta version of the game, using a larger panel, before preparing for the soft launch with an expected 5000-10 000 users.
