Understanding Playstation 5 User Experience.
Next-generation gaming consoles are almost here for players to get their hands on. Microsoft’s XBOX Series X, S, and Sony’s PlayStation 5 (PS5) will be releasing this holiday season.
Marketing efforts from both companies are in full throttle and it is not every day that we get to see gaming companies demonstrating their user experience to attract players.
Sony just released a video demonstrating user experience for its upcoming console. Being a user experience designer, it intrigues me to analyze the core fundamentals of user experience for PS5.
Here’s what Hideaki Nishino, Senior Vice President of Platform Planning and Management had to say about the core user experience philosophy behind PS5.
“We believe that your (player) playtime is valuable and should be meaningful”.
So what does this mean in practice for the players?
Saving player time
For start, the PS5 user experience is designed to eliminate time that users spend outside of the console ecosystem. PS5 provides information to players for which they would have to hunt elsewhere on the web.
What kind of information we are talking about here? For instance, players sometimes can get stuck on a level or are unable to solve a particular in-game puzzle.
This can be frustrating for them, so in order to find a way out, players have to open their mobile phone or computer browsers to see a walkthrough, taking users away from the core experience.
To enhance the player experience and being true to the philosophy highlighted by Hideaki Nishino, PS5 provides gameplay walkthroughs within its ecosystem, via picture-in-picture mode or as an additional stackable window. PS5 leverages its powerful hardware to achieve this seamless experience.
Another instance, PlayStation will present micro “activities” to players that they can attempt. “Time to complete” details of a particular activity is shown to the player and also if their friends have already completed that activity or not.
Activity is also loaded for the player in case he/she decides to complete it, saving significant game browsing time for the player.
Meaningful experience
Playing with friends and family systems in PS5 is designed with ease of use. PlayStation wants players to be able to communicate, share, and play games together with minimal effort. For example, the microphone for the console is integrated into the controller itself, so that players do have to physically attach it.
Players to player interaction are enhanced with PS5’s screen share feature, screen share allows players to view the gameplay of another player in real-time.
Additional players can be added to the party for group gameplay sessions. Going further, players will be able to jump into their friend’s games and play together with not more than three taps/clicks.
Social media sharing of gameplay footage and screenshots can be enabled via a press of a button on the controller. Jumping between games is also made seamless with the help of SSD used within PS5 hardware.
Playstation 5 aims to enhance user dependency on its ecosystem by providing them time-saving and collaborative user experience. So far it seems to be done quite well. All interactions are kept within the range of 1–3 taps/clicks.
My aim with this writeup was to better understand the translation of Sony’s user experience and share it with you. On a closing note, PS5 has been able to deliver on its user experience philosophy of saving the user time and making it more meaningful as we have seen. Let us see how this translates into practice and how users will receive the console user experience upon release.
This article is written for Medium and Concept Collective a Linkedin group. At Concept Collective our aim is to encourage dialogue and creativity in the use of technology, for the sole purpose of preservation and sustainability of humanity for it to achieve whatever it is destined for. Please do like & share the post, given that you actually liked it. You can join Concept Collective on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin & Instagram.
