Day 1 : Understanding needs and define the problem

NOTE-N-MAP 

After one hour of introductory meeting with the team, the design sprint kicks start with the stakeholder interviews. There are rounds of interviews, in that we try very hard to understand the context and why the firm seeks to build a native game app; a considerable effort to meet internal clients needs. GRDF has some 11,900+ employees as of 2020, a large corporation. So we put on our researcher/entrepreneurs' hats to ask big questions, like: 

• What is the vision/purpose for the game?

• Who will play the  game? Who will use this game? 

• What kind of jobs do this people have? Where do they work? What is the context of their work?

• How will this game make them better employees?

• What is missing in your existing onboarding/instructional systems? 

• What do they need to learn? 

• Is there another game you are building today?

• What is a stressful situation? Any examples? + very important but we fail to ask; otherwise we could have incorporated a narrative for each game.

• Why do you want to develop this game? + miss to ask this fundamental question

• How do you measure success of this game? + miss to ask too

To our questions, our stakeholders has responded with pre-selected personae, which is helpful to understand who are the end-users and what their problems are. It seems that we are on track to define the main question of our quest. 

After a morning of discussion with stakeholders, and after writing up many questions, we finally settle one the last one.

👉  How can gamification measure and improve learning outcome on in-demand skills and increase team collaboration in a demanding situation?" 

Method : HMW "How MIGHT we" 

We all have coffee and are set to rake our brains. Once we identify the areas that are to be developed into a HMW statement (Step 1),  we expand each area with the help of the e-learning instructional design system model, the "Dick Carey Principle" (Step 2). We used the ARCS Model of Motivational Design developed by John Keller (Step 3) as a reference to understand what motivate online learning. And that is how our HMV statement itemised into Action, Who and What. 

Step 1: Identify scope

Step 2: Expand and develop

Step 3

Rely on this instructional design model to provide a strong reference when designing the gameplay. This list is suitable for developing heuristic evaluation for e-learning.

Step 4

Each of the sprinter takes turn to present their own point of view (POV) then we go ahead with the HMW that get most of the votes. 

Step 5

Discussion about long-term objectives and obstacles, then speak about them in details with stakeholders. In some design workshops, designers may document this and have stakeholders to sign a copy of the printed version before developing the next step.

Step 6 

NOTE N MAP 

By now, we have all the high level decisions made for the project. It is time, we create a user journey to understand how the user interacts with the game.

Step 7

Next we move on to gain perspective on the high level design features. This exercise will increase understand on the best products in the market, a simplified version of a competitive analysis. 

Day 2: Sketch da ideas

Today our team will explore potential solutions to the problem we defined on Day 1. It will be a big day, because we will have expert interview in between the production time. I am particularly pleased about meeting the stakeholders again, we can finally ask the questions we missed yesterday. And I have my questions ready before the meeting this morning! 

Conceptualising idea

After having refreshed ourselves with these creative methods, we reorganise our notes, then jot down more ideas in drawings and texts. We had some crazy 8 fun; sketch the screens to illustrate a design summary. We saw lightbulbs everywhere!

I start out to create a 8-part narrative by illustrating a technical lead who receives an urgent phone call...  in face of a stressful situation, his team will go through the emergency protocol, gain batches after playing the stress management and know-hows games.

Next, I sketch a stressful situation in which 2 technicians express doubt in choosing between a red and a green button (below left), this plot will later be translated into the unplanned events. As to the sketch on the right below, it will be adopted into the game configuration as well as the avatar screens. 

My sketch below provides 9 different screens of the game, it will become part of the turn-based interaction.

Day 3: Vote for the best screens and Storyboard-it

It looks like we have some voting to do. Once we choose our favourite sketches,  we move on to create the user flow. For which, each of us have 6 posts-in to work on. 

Once user flows are ready, we vote again to capture the most relevant posts-in to lay the basis for our storyboarding. We choose 12 user flow posts-ins and develop an extra posts-in to compliment the flow. We can hardly believe it, storyboard done and dusted!

Then the screens are developed step-by-step according to the storyboard. Below are screens concerning the RTS gameplay. 

The same method is applied to create the dashboard, the obvious challenge here is to design the display of data points, between users i.e. players and trainer. Below is a draft copy of the initial dashboard (Yann's sketch) that provides an ego-view leaderboard.

This game has meant to create an immersive experience, more particularly carrying out tasks in uncomfortable situations, facing ambiguity, distractions of competing objectives, noise and unplanned events, to challenge players' cognitive ease that will eventually amount to a domino effect to induce cognitive load. 

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnamen (Tversky and Kahneman (1973)) famously provided a powerful insight into how people make decision and how judgements happen. One of the most revisiting areas are behaviour and attitudinal's decision making.  Kahnamen explained in his book, Think fast and Slow, through the personification of the complex inter-working of the brain, whereas the fast thinking brain, he called it "System 1" is in charge of providing evidence and emotional input while the slow thinking brain or "System 2" is responsible for judging the input. When facing uncertainty, the fast thinking brain provides countered-advice to slow thinking brain before reaching a supportive decision or rejecting System 1's suggestion. Kahnamen went on to prove that although human mind is capable of rationalising and analysing, the imprint of one's past experience forms part of the semantics structure of the brain, and this huge personal database contributes to subjective bias, which can trigger affect heuristic when facing a question. Unlike usability test that is to identify a problem based on computing and analysing functionality flaws, "available heuristic" assesses likability based on bias of "System 1". According to Kahnamen, heuristic plays an important role of regulating the mind and avoiding cognitive overload, it is skilled to replace a difficult question by an easier one. For example: "Do you think the temperatures will fluctuate between 12.3 to 15.7 celsius during the 46th and 47th weeks in the North of France in the next 10 years?" This question requires statistics review to check temperatures in certain periods of the previous years then study the meteorological forecast before giving a quality answer. So for "System 1", the part of the brain that releases our day-to-day invaluable intuitive judgments, to perform its function and to avoid cognitive overload, or in plain language making life simpler, will seek to answer an easier question, like "How do I like the weather last autumn in France?". Though both question will return either "yes" or "no", the mental work behind differs so as to the reliability of the answer. According to behavioural economists, this kind of substitution is ubiquitous, and is not uncommon to be found in the area such as executive decision, financial market, political election, commerce and personnel review. 

Flaws in human judgement or behaviour economics is relatively new which contradicts the traditional view of an all-mighty human mind is capable of. Yet this theory has proven being useful in many areas, and most remarkable application is found in the fields of consumer behaviours, economics, medicine, judiciary and public policy. 

I borrowed Kahnamen's powerful theory of cognitive ease and cognitive overload to create the visual experience below, which is designed to stimulate a cognitive overload, that is, as an ultimate goal, to awake the more deliberative, logical, slower thinking part of the brain, which operates in an static state by default. For during most of our days, the fast thinking part of the brain does the most of the mental work which, oppose to its logical counterpart, operates in an autopilot fashion. This means our brain is capable of assessing information between size and intensity, recalling memory, making involuntary comparison, to cover the significant portion of our daily intuitive decision making process without a noticeable effort. This is self-explanatory of how System 2 can indulge in the luxury of relaxation when it is not being summoned. Despite its laziness and slowness, the logical brain is responsible of complex computation, producing high level abstract thinking and reasoning, it sometimes even refutes our own intuition when it detects self-critic is needed.  

Understanding these psychological principles can help designers to make fair design decisions . The size of the screen, the pace of the game, the progressive information disclosure, the narrative design, the consistency, the predictability, the visual representation, users' attention, the instructional design and the control and freedom available to users, all actively contributes to the likeliness that the user will have towards our product. Even the slightly positive change in the interface will culminate to a positive user experience. Heuristics and usability are distinctive subjects require mastery of understanding and planning to sustain success. 

Game on! To experience cognitive load, consider the question below while reading the animated message. 

Press "z" to reset screen size.

Are you frowning? If yes, it means the exercise is stretching your mental effort. Be aware, don’t let your emotional "availability  heuristics" produces too hastily a conclusion and replaces the hard question by an easy one, like “Do I like to have fun?”, or “How do I like to have fun?” or “Do I like the colours of these fonts?”

Day 4: Prototype delivered by close of day!

Click on the screen or hotspots to play the game. 

Press "z" to reset screen size.

Check out the flow plan below to see how screens interact with one and others. 

Day 5 : 5 Heuristic usability evaluations

I volunteered to prepare the test script (enclosed below). The strategy I used was to develop a script to test with end users, in our case, gas engineer on training. But I was wrong, and it turned out the script I prepared wasn't quite right for heuristic usability evaluation.  Yet, usability test deals with a larger scope of work, it extends to cover the context, goals and behaviours of the user while heuristic evaluation invites experienced evaluators to critique/discuss best practice and overall performance and interface design. I was underprepared, still deleting the questions enquiring background information of users had eventually prevented to me to ask redundant questions to expert evaluators. I have listed out the main distinctions between the two tests in the paragraph below.

To develop a list of the heuristics, I then chose to have evaluators commented on each screens. The decisions was made quickly to facilitate a throughout a test without missing any interaction. We were lucky, the tests went extremely well so as to the collection of data. 

Though it is for the evaluators to establish the evaluation reports, the task of organising the design iteration rests with the design team. 

The panel on the left hand side below shows notes taken during the tests and are being moved to the right panel when the tests are completed. The move facilitates to the compiling of the to-do-list, paves the way for the prioritisation before design iteration.

Week 2

Day 6-7: Interface major overhang overhaul

As the qualitative observational research leads us into a deeper understanding of the product and the to-do-list guides us on what details to be changed to meet iteration. 

Day 8-9: Product pitch

Press "z" to reset screen size.