Month: November 2017

Since this was Thanksgiving week, we only had Monday and Tuesday to work. However, we made the most of it! On Monday we finished our implementation, and on Monday evening, we playtested it with ETCers. We offered free pizza and invited our peers to the 5th floor lounge, where we asked them to watch one episode of Relationship Status (episode 4) and then try out our experience. During the playtest, we were focused on answering four questions:

• Is the experience engaging for people who have watched the show?
• Is it uncomfortable to keep the phone high enough to see the characters?
• Do the personality descriptions for each value resonate with users?
• Is the experience intuitive?

In general, the feedback we received was pretty positive! Users generally stayed in the experience longer than they were required to, answering all of the questions about Episode 4, and then exploring further to answer questions about episodes they had not seen. The majority of users felt that holding the phone was not uncomfortable – especially since they can put the phone down while answering questions, and only need to hold it up while examining characters. The personality descriptions certainly resonated with users – one user, who was given “Integrity,” literally said “That’s so me!” Additionally, we found that our experience was intuitive. We had one playtester who had never used AR before, and he figured out how to use the experience without instruction. While there were a couple of hiccups that we noticed that we wanted to change before finals, overall the playtest was a success.

On Tuesday, we put final polishes in for Softs.

During Week 11, we used feedback from Playtest Day to come up with a new (and improved) design for our Storiverse experience. Week 12, then, was all about implementing this design. This meant a lot of work for everyone on the team:

• As the designer, I had to write a design document for the new experience, so that the programmers and artists would have implementation guidelines. (That document can be found here.) I also had to go through the episodes we decided to use for our experience – episodes 1, 4, and 5 – and identify each individual “scene” of the episode, which would constitute an event in the relationship maps of the characters involved. Furthermore, I had to come up with questions to ask the user about various scenes, and the personal values reflected in the answers to these questions. (I ended up with Openness, Decorum, Justice, Integrity, Courage, and Stability.)
• The artists had to come up with a way to display personality statistics, which would replace the interaction panels from the previous iteration of the experience (although the personality stats would not require the user to find a flat surface in their environment.) The artists also had to propose a way to display the relationship events (when the user clicks on them) that can include a question, but can also have space without a question if there is no question associated with that event.
• The programmers had to fill the database with the correct data about each character, relationship event, and question that would be included in the new iteration. They also had to connect the prototype to the database, which had not been done in past versions. (On Playtest Day, we tested a version of the app in which all of the data was hardcoded. However, for this version, there was too much data, and hardcoding was not a viable solution.)

We were also fortunate in that we got to have another meeting with Susan Dansby, the soap opera writer. We pitched our new experience to Susan, and she loved it, telling us that we’ve given the users a great way to interact with the show content. For the show she works on, “The Young and the Restless,” producers have recently started putting “Previously, on The Young and the Restless…” clips at the end of episodes, instead of “Next time, on The Young and the Restless….” They have found that while the “Next time” clips made users who didn’t see their favorite characters less interested in watching the next episode, the “Previously on” clips reminded users of past drama and made them wonder how the situations would progress in the next episode, which hence made them eager to watch it. Thus, our experience has two benefits. Of course, it lets users connect themselves to the show by asking them to evaluate what they would have done in situations that the characters faced. But in addition, by allowing our users to review footage from episodes they had already seen, it also primes the users to watch more episodes. We were very encouraged by Susan’s feedback.

Before we ended our meeting with Susan, she made a suggestion to improve the experience further. She pointed out that when people take any sort of personality quiz, they want to know not just how they are, but also how other people – such as friends and romantic interests – react to them. Since this is the case, she suggested that we write a description for each personal value that can result from the questions, including those sorts of details. We agreed that this was a good idea.

Although we were not able to test with many people in our target audience on Playtest Day, we were able to learn many things which indicated to us that we needed to change our experience. For example, when we asked playtesters where they generally used their phones, we got a wide variety of answers, from bed, to public transportation. We wanted our experience to be available to users wherever they may be using their phones, but our current experience demanded that the user have access to a large, flat surface (where the interaction panel, episode box, and inventory box would be placed), and such a surface would not be available in many of the locations our playtesters use their phones. Therefore, we knew that we had to change the experience so that it would not have specific requirements for the attributes of the play space.

Additionally, we found that many users did not remember the objects to which we had attached questions. The example question we used – “The last time your SO got you a present, was it because you were mad?” – was attached to a rose, because it referenced a scene in which Peter bought Libby a rose after leaving her at the lunch table to go flirt with a waitress. This made sense to the project members, because we have watched the episode many times, so we remember exactly what happened in the episode. However, our playtesters – having only seen the episode once – did not make the connection, and felt that the rose was a random object. Therefore, we decided that we would have to detach the questions from the objects.

Finally, we saw while playtesting that the commenting feature was very clunky. A playtester would look at other users’ comments, and think they were supposed to tap the one that most closely reflected their views on the question. Additionally, playtesters did not see the point in adding their own comments. While playtesters seemed to engage with the question itself, we needed to find a way for the experience to respond to their answers, rather than asking them to clarify in a comment.

Thus, we decided to scrap the episode box, interaction panel, and inventory box, and build our experience based on the relationship map alone. We would still ask the users questions about what happened in the show, but instead of attaching those questions to objects, we would attach them to the relationship event to which the question referred. (For example, when a user looked at Peter and Libby’s relationship and clicked on the event where Libby reveals that she spied on him through Find My Phone, the user would be able to see a clip of the event – as originally designed in the relationship map – and would also be able to answer the question, “Is it ok to snoop on a partner you think is cheating?) Additionally, when the user answered a question, the app would respond by telling the user what their answer revealed about their values. (For example, if a user said “Yes” to the above question, the user values justice. If they said “No,” then they value integrity.) In this way, we sort of combine the relationship map with a personality quiz. No matter how the user answers any question, the corresponding personality value is always a positive one, so the user can always feel good about how they would handle the situations in which the characters find themselves.

This week on Saturday, we had our ETC Playtest Day! Playtest Day is a proud tradition of ETC during which we invite guests of all ages to visit us, take a tour of ETC, experience our projects and share with us with much appreciated feedback.

For our project, we asked for adult playtesters due to the mature content we had in some of the episodes of Relationship Status. We conducted 40-minute testing session with each group of playtesters (from 3 to 6 people). During each session, we started by asking the playtesters general questions regarding their habits using mobile application and watching TV shows. For example, “On which device do you usually watch TV shows?” or “What are some of your favorite shows?”

After that, we showed them Episode 4 of Relationship Status and walked them through our AR experience.

(Please refer to the video below to see the Playtest Day version of the prototype which we used for the session.)

 

We followed up by asking them to share their experiences interacting with our prototype. We gathered lots of interesting and useful feedback to help inform our design changes and iterations.

The major lessons we learned out of this playtesting session are:

1. Users do not always have access to a surface to start this experience.
2. Users don’t recognize or remember the objects from the show.
3. The relationship map and the questions don’t seem to have any meaningful connections.
4. There isn’t much to do after collecting the objects and answering the questions.

Based on our findings, we would be working toward another prototype in the coming weeks to address these issues and explore more possibilities.

See you next time!

This week, we had our Halves presentation on Wednesday. That meant that the first part of the week was dedicated to polishing our presentation – finalizing our slides, and rehearsing what we were going to say. At Shirley and Chris’s suggestion, we spent very little presentation time on QB1, and tried to clearly explain the product that we are making.

Here is a recording of our official presentation on Wednesday:

On Wednesday afternoon, we debriefed with our client, Philip, who had come to see the presentation. He was happy with the direction we had chosen for the project, and thought we did a good job detailing our plans. Then, Shirley came and gave us feedback from the faculty. Overall, faculty response to our presentation was fairly positive. One of our main concerns going into the presentation was that we could not properly justify the use of AR for this project, but the majority of the faculty were satisfied knowing that our client had requested that we use new technology. Additionally, faculty felt that we pivoted well from QB1 to Relationship Status, and had made progress on our project despite the huge change. As we near the end of the semester, the faculty expects us to polish our design and validate that the mechanics work for our target audience.

We were also lucky enough to talk to Christian, our client’s director, about our project. Christian was excited not only about our product, but also about the research we are doing into how audiences want to interact with extra content from shows. He also mentioned that it would be great if we could frame our product in a way that shows how it integrates with the Go90 mobile app. Since we don’t have access to the back end of the app, Philip suggested that we create a video-watching experience to go before the AR experience, which would look like the Go90 app. That is one of the things we’ll be working on next week.