Niall White has been with Logitech for 30 years; since 1996. His role is primarily focused on product development, but his background includes aeronautical & mechanical engineering. For the last 10 years, his focus has expanded to Logitech’s research & innovation efforts to discover the next great product or idea. Based out of Cork, Ireland, he works closely with the Lero Esports Science Research Centre in Limerick to test and monitor gamers’ performance. 

I think it's simply the chance to study pros that are at a completely different level. We've had testing sessions going back seven, eight, nine years where sometimes the results just made no sense. We’d think ‘pros can't be doing it that fast, right?’

I remember a guy in Counter-Strike who was doing practice games with bots and he was changing bot behavior live with text. He was typing faster than I could read it – tuning the game live as he goes – and continuing to play all in one movement. I thought, wow.

Pros are at such a different level compared to aspiring and recreational gamers. Over the last 10 years of university research, we’ve studied many hundreds of highly ranked gamers. These are the top gamers that really know what they are doing. And still there is definitely a step change moving to pro players and it’s such a spectacle to see.

Pros are performing at physical and mental levels that are greater than a regular gamer – when you compare the differences in performance, it just makes complete sense. We saw that back in 2016, when we started to apply traditional sports science to esports, something that had never been done before at our scale.

To develop next level products, we knew we had to understand the athlete better. Logitech’s been making gaming mice for almost 25 years and general computer mice for over 40 years. To continue making products better, we need a really deep understanding of the people who are using it.

Pros are the elite users of our gaming mice and we always want to test the limits of any design we have – how far can the product or the user go? You can't have anybody better than pros to test the limits of what your product can do.

In product development, we want to improve as-live-as-possible. When athletes are engaged in the design process, we get raw, actionable feedback early – which we can interrogate and make design choices while things are still in development.

We can also measure what’s really happening in players’ physical and cognitive performance, which we compare to the feedback they offer to validate if the changes will improve the product. It’s an important chance for our teams to interrogate our designs and tear it apart, based on how athletes perform with it. Unique to us, we can also test experimental ideas and discover insights separate from product development cycles with our dedicated athlete research programs.

This defends us from focusing on trends and instead be self-determining – deciding what is the right thing to do and developing the technology to make that happen, rather than what happens in our space all the time chasing hot topics. We can drive the trends with our discoveries and be the market leader in the hyper competitive gaming peripheral industry

Pro players have such tight schedules and we don’t often have the luxury of designing long-term trials, so we have to be inventive and exaggerate the system to make the most out of our time and results of tests. A few years ago, we were studying fatigue in gaming to prevent long-term injury with all these sensors on players’ arms.

The tests were taking too long to measure fatigue states, so we made a special 500 gram (1.102 pound) mouse. By the end of the first minute, there's a lot of shouting and at the end of the second minute, people have their head in their hands. It’s an extreme example, but we were able to extract the data we needed. It was a good laugh.

People in product development push the boundaries because generally it's the middle of the road stuff that is where you end up. But for research, we can go push the envelope to try and develop things that you just wouldn't think of otherwise.