Minnesdjungeln
Interactive online game
Project
Online game about Quantified Self for the science center Universeum
Duration
2 months
Role:
Designer, Researcher (in a team of five)
Tools
Paper/pen, sticky notes, whiteboard, Figma, Visual Studio Code
"How can we inspire teens to learn more about science and lead them into research in a fun and interactive way?"
The Design Process
Understanding the problem
In an early stage, we had decided that the project should base on how chimpanzees' short-term memory is better than most humans, which is a study made by Tetsuro Matazawa. Having this idea in mind, we aimed to understand how to create an insightful experience with relevant learning outcomes for the target group. After visiting Universeum and interviewing visitor guides and the creators of a similar memory game for an exhibition in the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm, we ended up with key findings.
Key findings and insights
Personal Results
The target group found it most interesting when they can relate the information to themselves. The individual result is always a sucess factor for making attraction engaging.
Challenge
Anything that is related to a challenge will engage users to interact with it more than once. It was found that people often came back to attractions that had high score lists.
Straight forward
The target group has a short attention span, which means that the introduction should be easy to understand without reading a wall of text.
Defining the requirements
The next thing was to establish features and functions to fulfil the goal. We used methods and frameworks such as the MosCoW-matrix to define the requirements into must, should, could and won’t have. MDA-framework was used to decide what emotions to evoke when playing the game and what game mechanics to implement to get the desired effect. The Golden path helped us break down the different stages (pre-during-after) of experience to illustrate the ideal path for the user to find the experience’s real value.
Ideate on solutions
With the solid background, we could start with generating solutions using the ideation technique Crazy 4 (our version of Google’s Crazy 8’s). It helped us come up with different ideas to find the best way to fulfil the goal. We finalized this phase with a storyboard to summarize our thoughts and ideas. This helped us to have a common understanding of the overall experience.
Prototype the best idea
To implement our ideas and understand how many screens we wanted to have, we started with a low fidelity prototype on Figma with the pre-game and end-game screens. Parallel with that, the memory game itself was coded using Visual Studio Code. We tested two variants of end-game screens to test which would fit better in terms of the game flow.
Testing the prototype
The main thing we wanted to test was if the lo-fi prototype was straightforward and what to improve it. We tried ourselves in the team and shared it with our classmates, where we did a think aloud (remotely).
Iterate
Based on the feedback from our lo-fi prototype, we went back to ideate on solutions and tried out different ideas. Eventually, high fidelity prototypes came to life, and we could test them. Two evaluation sessions were held remotely with the target group (six participants in total) using the method think aloud on the high fidelity prototype. We received valuable feedback and iterated until we found it to be perfect.
Final Design
The final design resulted in an interactive online game where players can try their short term memory and compare that to a chimpanzee. The players will realize that there will be nearly impossible to beat the short term memory of a chimpanzee which was found in a study by the researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa. The game is a replicate (with additional features) of the game Matsuzawa tested on the chimpanzee Auymu. We hope that this game will open a door for teenagers to get introduced to the world of science... and to understand how this is even possible (spolier: cognitive trade-off hypothesis).
Feedback from course examiner
“I was sceptical that this idea was strong enough in
isolation to carry a project, and I am delighted the project group ignored
me
and went ahead with it because I was completely wrong. It's wonderful both
as a
concept and as a QS project. The overall concept of the project is very
smart,
extremely concise and the exact right level of learning goals for the target
group. This game was addictive, while being simple and well done. That being
said the actual game is a self-sufficient prototype that could easily be
implemented at universeum tomorrow!”
- Feedback from the course examiner
What I learnt
Visual style is A and O: Well designed products, along with good interactions, are the key to draw people’s attention. People loved the style combined with the playful sound and was encouraged to try out the game.
Strive to re-experience the experience: Visitors at our final exhibition kept playing it until they felt exhausted and often came back when they had new energy. At the end of the day of an eight-hour exhibition with nearly 50 people, the game reached 350 play attempts. For us, that was a success factor.
Document everything: I am so happy to be a part of a team that was extremely fun to work with and saw the value of documentation. Now, I am so glad that I can go back to our reflections and images from this project.