Last week we were able to conduct our first formal UX evaluation of our game prototype. Users were able to navigate through a clickthrough pdf version of the apartment, while still being able to collect the physical item tokens that we had created last term. There were 3 main key evaluation points of our UX evaluation: 1) navigation, 2) game play observation, and 3) intuitive interaction points.
Here are some things that went well:
Some things that didn't go so well:
We hope to make these changes in order to strengthen our UX testing for our second round, in which we hope to work with a more targeted and specific audience type.
Here are some things that went well:
- Our evaluation was extremely thorough! We had a quicktime recording of the computer screen to track mouse movement/navigation, a video camera recording, audio recording, as well as a scribe to document the process.
- Our post-questionnaire allowed us to hit every concern we had.
- Users were vocal and thoughtful in their responses, we saw how deeply our topic resonated with them.
- We were able to see how users expected the game to conclude (added resources, evaluation of items chosen, seeing items in action).
- Gamers and non-gamers alike found interest in the game.
Some things that didn't go so well:
- We were able to test only 6 participants. We did not get as many participants as we would have liked due to time constraints. We will need to make changes to the structure of our test (going through media releases with participants during set up, having more people on hand to help out with facilitating and recording observations, having more laptops to test on).
- Issues in the clickthrough made it difficult for the users to immerse themselves in the experience. There were dead ends and loops that made it difficult to access certain rooms. We had to verbally grant access to the storage one in one particular case because our tester spent a frustratingly long time trying to get there.
- Our testers were a little more informed about emergency preparedness then we were hoping for. We want to inform and encourage people to learn more about the issue, however our testers were looking for more advanced information to build upon what they already knew.
We hope to make these changes in order to strengthen our UX testing for our second round, in which we hope to work with a more targeted and specific audience type.