Understanding Players' Interaction Patterns with Mobile Game App UI via Visualizations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visualization approach to analyze and understand player interaction patterns in complex multi-touch mobile game apps, aiding UI design and refinement.

Contribution

It presents a novel visualization method specifically designed for multi-touch gaming interactions, addressing the challenge of complex UI behavior analysis.

Findings

Identified dynamic gesture patterns of players.

Compared gesture behaviors across different players.

Highlighted gaps between UI design and actual player practices.

Abstract

Understanding how players interact with the mobile game app on smartphone devices is important for game experts to develop and refine their app products. Conventionally, the game experts achieve their purposes through intensive user studies with target players or iterative UI design processes, which can not capture interaction patterns of large-scale individual players. Visualizing the recorded logs of users' UI operations is a promising way for quantitatively understanding the interaction patterns. However, few visualization tools have been developed for mobile game app interaction, which is challenging with multi-touch dynamic operations and complex UI. In this work, we fill the gap by presenting a visualization approach that aims to understand players' interaction patterns in a multi-touch gaming app with more complex interactions supported by joysticks and a series of skill buttons. Particularly, we identify players' dynamic gesture patterns, inspect the similarities and differences of gesture behaviors, and explore the potential gaps between the current mobile game app UI design and the real-world practice of players. Three case studies indicate that our approach is promising and can be potentially complementary to theoretical UI designs for further research.