What sorts of issues and opportunities have these sorts of studies allowed you to uncover? Depending upon the stage in the product's development cycle, we can uncover a wide variety of issues andjor opportunities. For example, during a usability study in the earlier stages of development we might determine that a feature we designed for the game needs to be improved, revised, or even removed. At a later stage in development, for example during our beta testing, the focus of the feedback is typically centered on how the game increases in difficulty from level to level and we'll make final adjustments based upon the trends shown by a large sample size of users. • An example of the first type of feedback from our hit product Diner Dash would

be the noisy customers that were planned for the sequel in Diner Dash 2 as another thing that Flo has to serve in her restaurant. During the study players reacted negatively to cell-phone yakking customers and did not know what to do with them; yet players had the opposite reaction to noisy families. Even though the two customer types worked essentially the same way, players loved the families and immediately knew how to respond to them in the game. As a

direct result of XEODesign's* study, PlayFirst swapped the order of these two customer types so that the families appear right from the start to get players excited about this new challenge in the game. XEODesign's observations of these subtle moment to moment player reactions to player actions are easily lost in a post-play focus group or survey. Diner Dash's one million paying customers is further proof that emotion works well in casual games.