Epic Games Project

Paragon HUD Analysis

For this project, I worked with two other graduate students to investigate the heads up display (HUD) of the game Paragon. This was a semester long project done as part of our Human Factors Seminar and in collaboration with the Epic Games development team. Paragon is within the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre which calls for complex game mechanics due to the overwhelming amounts of information players need to keep track of during the game. Unfortunately, Paragon did not have the most intuitive HUD which likely led to frustration, creating a barrier for new players and therefore decreased new player retention. Thus, our objective was to improve overall new player retention by focusing on how to best train players on the uses of the HUD. This project consisted of three main phases.

Phase 1

Assessed Paragon for critical usability issues within the HUD that may have affected new player retention.

• Methods included a component analyses of the HUD, a survey administered to online gaming forums via Reddit, and one usability test using a think-aloud protocol. 

Phase 2

Used information gathered from Phase 1 as well as a literature review to provide design recommendation regarding the HUD to Epic Games and created a prototype HUD Tutorial

• Created the interactive HUD tutorial using PowerPoint

Phase 3

Test the effectiveness of our solutions on new player retention.

• Experiment: 10 subjects (5 = no tutorial, 5 = tutorial). Looked at whether participants in the tutorial group would be more likely to play Paragon again, if they liked the game, and their overall task load. We measured these variables using surveys, the NASA TLX, and semi-structured interviews.