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Survey questions for assessing usability in your playtest

A selection of tried-and-tested survey questions that can assess usability for you to use and adapt

Gareth Lloyd avatar
Written by Gareth Lloyd
Updated over a week ago

Usability should be primarily assessed by watching player behaviours and by probing their understandings of the game's systems. However, there are a few questions that you can ask in surveys that touch on usability, most notably the effectiveness of in-game menus, symbols, language and controls.


How to use these questions

Where possible, we try to provide survey response option scales that include:

  • Five or seven response points, in order to provide a reasonable trade off between granularity and ease of response,

  • A central neutral option,

  • Negative responses below the neutral response, and positive responses above it.

This structure allows us to assign positive, negative or neutral scores to responses (from -2 to +2, or -3 to +3) which can be helpful in visualising and communicating outcomes later on.

Some questions are scored in specific ways:

  • Where questions are reverse coded, this means that responses on the upper end of the scale are negative. If you want to compare these questions directly with other questions that are non reverse coded, you will need invert the scores.

  • Where questions are middle-optimal, this means that the most positive response is in the middle of the response scale. The lowest and highest scores here represent negative extremes: e.g. 'too hard' or 'too easy'.

These questions are not formally validated or part of a single tool or scale, so feel free to use individual items or modify questions for your current research goal. However, you might find more value in them by using them repeatedly, whether across multiple playtests, or in some cases, on multiple days on a longitudinal playtest. This way you can track changes to these responses over time, especially where you have enough players to aggregate responses.

Please indicate your agreement or disagreement with the following statement:

The menus were easy to navigate

Multiple choice (single selection)

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree


3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

Please indicate your agreement or disagreement with the following statement:

I was always able to find what I was looking for in the game's menus

Multiple choice (single selection)

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree


3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

Please indicate your agreement or disagreement with the following statement:

I always understood what the icons and symbols in the game were supposed to mean

Multiple choice (single selection)

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree


3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

Please indicate your agreement or disagreement with the following statement:

The game's controls needed to be adjusted to my own preferences

Multiple choice (single selection)

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree


3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

Please indicate your agreement or disagreement with the following statement:

I was able to adjust the game's controls to my own preferences

Multiple choice (single selection)

1 – Strongly disagree

2 – Disagree


3 – Somewhat disagree

4 – Neither agree or disagree

5 – Somewhat agree

6 – Agree

7 – Strongly agree

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