Nancy Toth

• The video game industry is the biggest and fastest-growing entertainment industry. With the increasing popularity, the importance of game user experience has grown as well. The lack of menu standardization and multi-platform compatibility represent some of the important usability issues present in many games. This thesis proposes an approach to understand and improve the user experience of video game menus by analyzing existing game menus and crowdsourcing user ideas. This research argues that one menu concept can be adapted for different platforms to achieve good usability and efficiency. Therefore, an exemplary menu was created for the user study, and usability testing has been conducted on two different platforms to evaluate the concept. The results show that one menu concept can achieve good usability on both platforms and the same efficiency with different input modalities, however, due to small sample size, these findings must be interpreted carefully. The results also emphasize the importance of logical informationThe video game industry is the biggest and fastest-growing entertainment industry. With the increasing popularity, the importance of game user experience has grown as well. The lack of menu standardization and multi-platform compatibility represent some of the important usability issues present in many games. This thesis proposes an approach to understand and improve the user experience of video game menus by analyzing existing game menus and crowdsourcing user ideas. This research argues that one menu concept can be adapted for different platforms to achieve good usability and efficiency. Therefore, an exemplary menu was created for the user study, and usability testing has been conducted on two different platforms to evaluate the concept. The results show that one menu concept can achieve good usability on both platforms and the same efficiency with different input modalities, however, due to small sample size, these findings must be interpreted carefully. The results also emphasize the importance of logical information architecture, showing that an accessibility setting category improves the findability of subtitle settings. Additionally, the findings indicate that user ideas collected through crowdsourcing can serve as a base for user-centered design.…