Hi all,
Happy Valentine’s Day and Quarters! It has been a really informative and busy week, we received a lot of feedback from all the faculty as well as our clients. A lot of things have been changed and we received many new ideas to consider. Also, we were preparing things for our first playtest at the Children’s Museum!!!
Design
This week we began with specifying the details of the story ideas short-listed last week. For each idea, we detailed how every scene would be presented to the child and at which points the questions would be asked. Since we had received the questions from the client, we had a better idea of the tone of the questions. This allowed us to choose the settings in which we could ask those questions. In response to the clients’ wish to have an adventure in our application, our design team pitched two ideas which have adventures.
One of our ideas is “pediatricianairy”, where the pediatricianairy took the children to meet three characters who overcame trauma and during which kids build relationship with the character and questions will be asked. It was a very ambitious story with a lot of various settings.
Another idea is the “Hot Air Balloon”, where instead of a character kids choose to customize a hot air balloon and associate themselves with the balloon. The exposure questions will be asked when the journey begins and then kids will go through different phases, during which questions will be asked accordingly.
¼ Walkthrough & Client Meeting
During quarters, we pitched our ideas to the faculty. They had very diverse views and all of them approached the topic of our project from a different perspective. Apart from general feedback, they also made us think more deeply about the objective of our project and the problem it was trying to solve.
We took our ideas and the feedback from the faculty to a meeting with the client. In the meeting, we were able to drill down the details and gain more clarity on what the client really wanted. We specified the most important aspects of the project and our approach towards the app changed after the discussion. We figured out that “adventure” and “building relationship” wouldn’t be necessary as mentioned before; Dr. Cohen considered efficiency and engagement as the most important part of the experience.
About character design, during quarters, we received feedback that the look we were going for might be too young. When we showed our prototype to the client, she said that it might be okay to have a cute or juvenile look because the serious nature of the questions would indicate that the child wasn’t being spoken down to.
On Friday, we had further meetings with instructors, faculty members and Garrett from Simcoach. All of these discussions gave us a lot of feedback on the direction that we were taking and how to chart out our next steps.
Prototyping
For the first two days of the week, we improved the inputs manager by rewriting lots of codes to create a better event interface so that the inputs can be used across the game more easily. We also spotted and fixed the problem of multi-touch so now up to 3 fingers can be recognized simultaneously. We limited the number to 3 because four or five inputs may be recognized as special gestures by the iPad system itself. And for the rest of week, we finished animation of the opening, after that we integrate the scripts, animations, sound into our question framework. Also, we make some adjustments to our framework to make it more extended and robust.
During the development process, we used a trail renderer as a debug tool to track players’ touch inputs. However, during the quarters, we found people were really fond of drawing on the face of the character because of the trail. So we later changed the testing tool into a feature by modifying it a little bit. Unfortunately the trail renderer is not perfect and has many weird problems. So fixing it will be on the to-do list in the future.
Playtest
Armed with all of this information, we conducted a playtest at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh on Saturday. We were fortunate to find plenty of children in our target age range who were willing to participate in our testing. We performed tests on various topics like the following:
- Character designs – Wide variety of characters compiled by us
- Environments / Locales – Different settings compiled by us
- Personal preferences – Color, story or characters that were appealing to them
- Voice – four different voices with varying tone and gender
- An interactive demo on the iPad
The playtest was successful and we were able to gain a lot of useful information from it.
For example, children preferred characters with big eyes and ones with distinguishing features. We had also made some assumptions heading into the test like:
– The children will not have trouble interacting with the iPad and will be able to comprehend the questions.
– The look of the character will not bother the older children as long as the questions and interactions do not feel childish.
These assumptions were validated by their responses and overall, all of them had a positive experience. This test wasn’t completely exhaustive in terms of background of the children, but we have a better idea about how kids perceive interactions on a tablet and how they deal with questions. We also learned things that will help improve our testing process in the future, like having an additional iPad and trying out child voices apart from adult ones.
We tested at the Children’s Museum this time to get to know our demographic, but since we know our app will be used in pediatric waiting rooms, we will try to test at schools in the future to get closer to a formal, clinical environment.
What’s Next
Next week, we’ll go over the results of our playtest, consolidate all of our feedback from quarters and our last client meeting, and begin working on the next iteration of our app. From next week, we need to design for the specifics of how to make our survey interactions engaging and fun without making children feel like they are being scoped.
