The Power of Visualization for Player Research

Data gathered in games user research and analytics is constantly growing in volume and diversity. Effective data visualizations are an important part of the user research toolbox to analyze, contextualize, and draw actionable insights from it as well as to communicate the gathered data to different stakeholders. However, visualizations may also introduce bias and perceptual fallacies which have to be kept in mind. This talk will cover several visualization techniques for player-related data, ranging from spatial visualizations such as the well-known heatmaps to hexbin maps, cluster maps, and rose diagrams to techniques for visualizing movement. Benefits and limitations of the different methods will be discussed to help choose appropriate visualizations for different analysis goals within the user research cycle and to highlight potential pitfalls.