This week, most of our efforts were focused on Showcase, during which a bunch of industry professionals come to the ETC to see what we’ve done with our projects this semester. Due to the way that Showcase is organized, with participants wandering from room to room as they see fit, we couldn’t demonstrate our Connect the Dots game. However, we were fortunate in that Showcase coincided with a Pirates game, and we used that to show off Prediction and Collect the Dots. We had the game streaming throughout the Showcase, and participants were able to interact with our experiences as if they were at the stadium for that particular game.
Results were pretty positive! Many participants asked when the app would be available in stadiums, and confirmed that using the prediction and collection games made them more invested in the outcome of the baseball game. We also had several participants stay in our room for more than half an hour, which is unusual for Showcase, since each participant only has a couple of hours to see all of the projects that spark their interest.
Additionally, through Showcase, we were able to see that changes we had made to the app since Softs were working as intended. People reacted well to the new tutorials, and didn’t dismiss them for being too wordy, as some users had before. Participants were also able to understand the Collection UI better than users had in previous playtests. Finally, although we ran the app on multiple devices for hours straight, we did not experience a single crash! Hallelujah!