Microgame: Towards understanding of gamification of workingtime interruptions

This microgame background research was conducted during the microgame proeject. Our group adopted systematic user research methods to identify potential problem space and the corresponding solutions. I seperate the research session of the project with the implementation sections and specifically focus on how our group conduct user research.

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Team: Gurdeet Singh, Marusa Hrobat, Zeyuan Zhang, Ziyi Zhang
Duration: October, 2019

Process —

In using a user-centered design process, we completed two research cycles using various user-centered research and design methods. Each research cycle consisted of three phases: Elaboration, design and test.

To address the issue of academic stress, we selected UCL (University College London) students as our target user group.

Research cycle I —

In this cycle, we aimed to identify and explore a relevant problem space and establish user-centered requirements for our project. To do this, we used several qualitative methods and design techniques. Firstly, to understand students’ existing problems, we devised a questionnaire and invited students to complete it. Secondly, based on initial findings we created user personas and rapid sketches of design ideas. Lastly, we used these to evaluate our initial design with six students using informal semi-structured interviews.

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Aims: define problem sapce and establish requirement
Tools: questionaire, storyboard, sketch, persona, semi-structured interview

Questionaire to explore design space —
In the questionaire session,we devide the question into sections invloving demographics, general behaviour variables, stress related questions, general gaming experience, altitudes and preference, volunteerlly follow-up interview inquiry. From which, we designed questions with placing negative and positive options interachangble to avoid single tendency when selecting answers.

Responses —
We received twenty-four questionnaire responses and found that the majority of respondents frequently experienced stress and reported their studies as the main reason for it. Among other negative consequences, they reported stress causing them to overthink which inhibits stress-relief. Students reported playing video games to de-stress and take a break from thinking. However, these were normally played in long sessions and hence did not constitute an ideal study-break activity.
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Selective response from questionniare:

Persona —
Accoring to our primary research, to better understand user groups, we generated several example persona board. From which we mainly define two target user groups, the primary user group is university students who constantly face academic pressure, while the secondary user group is the academic staffs working at university campus.

Illustrating initial ideas —
Thus, we decided to devise a game that would provide a short mental break from thinking during study breaks. These findings inspired our initial idea of augmenting a classic table-top stress-relief game with different sensor-based controllers, allowing for various interaction techniques (e.g. breathing, jumping, shouting). Informal evaluation showed that students liked the playfulness and novelty of the physical interface but they expressed concerns regarding the time and effort required to play. Further, they suggested increasing portability and availability of the game to decrease the effort required to switch between study and play.

Research cycle II —

Initial findings inspired us to learn more about students’ existing study-break practices and revise our initial design. In the second research cycle, we polish our idea a step further by observational studies from which we observed four students’ study session both at home and at campus. We were particularly interested in the frequency and duration of breaks, study break activities and the physical layout of students’ study spaces.

Observational findings and secondary research inspired our second design idea. We created another series of sketches and evaluated them with nine students using semi-structured interviews. We asked them about their studying habits, break-taking and de-stressing strategies, their opinions about the original water-ring game and our new design.

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Aims: refine initial idea, understand study pattern
Tools: affnity diagram, sketch, observation study, interview

Observation study findings —
To reveal our concerns towards those questions raised based on previous studies, we conducted onsite observation studies with four students from the primary groups. And we summarised our key findings as follow:

Sketch and selection of concepts —

Affinity diagram —
This inspired us to consider these objects and related unconscious actions instead of game controllers to minimise gameplay time and effort. In doing this, we increased the portability of the game, reduced the complexity of hardware and adopted a controller-less micro-game approach.

After evaluating this idea with users, we used thematic analysis and affinity diagramming to analyse the collected data.

Implementation —