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 stakeholder interviews. There are rounds of interviews, in that we tried 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, which is a large corporation. So we put on our researcher/entrepreneurs' hats to ask big questions, like: 

• What is the vision for this game?

• Who will play this  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 a 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 answers, 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 move on to define the main question of the quest. 

After a morning of discussion with stakeholders, and after writing up many questions, we finally agree to focus on 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 reference to understand what motivate online learning. And that is how our HMV statement itemised in to 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 into motivational design in e-learning 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 to gain affirmation. In some design workshops, designers may document this and have stakeholders to sign a copy of the printed version before developing the next steps.

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 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 similar, best products that exist in the market, a simplified version of competitive analysis. 

Day 2: Sketch da ideas

Conceptualising idea

I start out to create a 8-part narrative by illustrating a technical team lead who receives an urgent mission by a phone call...  in face of a stressful situation, his team will go on to perform the emergency protocol, gain scout batches after playing the stress management and know-hows games, that will mark milestone of success and drive learning engagement.

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

My sketch below provides 9 different screens of game, which will later turn into the turn-based interaction as part of the design.

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

Once we choose our favourite sketches,  we move on to create the user flow and storyboard.

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 and trainers. Below is a draft of the brainstorm  dashboard (Yann's sketch) that provides a player-view leaderboard. Image credit: Yann

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. 

Understanding user cognition 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, 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. 

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

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Day 4: Prototype delivered by close of day!

Click on the screen or hotspots to play the game. 

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

Day 5 : 5 Heuristic usability evaluations

To develop a list of the heuristics, I 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. 

A messt process leads to the prioritisation and iteration.

Week 2

Day 6-7: Interface major overhaul overhang

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 presentation

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