Design Process Overview
For our Project ‘ GamerWatch” it was an immediate choice within the team to focus our time and effort on good research and user testing as no one in the group is a parent and we felt our domain required a good understanding of what a parent is dealing with at a fundamental level when it comes down to this issue. To accomplish that we wanted to conduct as much User testing as possible whether it be Surveys, Interviews, Usability testing, User Evaluations , etc. All of this data would feed into a cycle of Defining, Designing, Prototyping, Evaluating. We Repeated this process through each stage of our project ultimately until we finished on our final prototype for the showcase.
Our domain is Gaming addiction in Adolescents, we picked this domain because we found this issue is becoming more and more relevant with the growing influence of Videogames in young children's lives. Children are uniquely susceptible to gaming addiction in regards to most other addictions such as alcohol or drugs as they are inherently restricted by laws and age requirements whereas Video Games can played by anyone. In depth domain research was initially conducted in order to grasp a better understanding on the underlying issues surrounding our domain. This initial research helped the group formulate our initial solution concepts.
Our Initial Idea for the problem space was to create a system or application which allowed parents to set tasks and goals for their kids to complete which in turn would allow them time to play there games depending on the difficulty or time it took to complete the chore or task. This would be done through connecting the system or application connecting with the video game console or PC to restrict access until certain tasks had been completed.
After discussing this Idea with users it became known to us that our initial idea may be gamifying the issue too much, thus leading to negatively reinforce the underlying issue of addiction to video games. It was also brought up by a few parents that they didn’t need the aid of a application like this as they could supply unplug or remove the gaming console or device themselves to restrict game time and this would be an unnecessary complication in there parenting process.
It was decided that we would change the core idea of our application so instead of restricting video game usage or gamifying it that we would instead provide the service of information to the parents, their ultimate concern was how long their child was playing the video games and what it is there child is doing on the video games; so we decided to cater to that need by making our project more of an information tool in a parents toolbox.
The medium fidelity prototype was designed to test the look and feel of the final application and as such this iteration of the prototype covers all areas of the functionality as defined by our domain and user research. This include stat breakdowns by time period and game, purchase breakdowns, as well as a suite of parental control settings.
The following need to be installed on the system
- Node.js (including npm)
Download or clone the repo onto your local system
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First globally install the react cli
npm install -g react-native-cliand real time editing tool expo globally vianpm install -g expo-clivia your command line interface. -
Navigate to the local repo inside of a command line interface (terminal, powershell, cmd) first type in
npm install
An excellent guide on how to enable native emulation when developing the application follow the link
type npm start in your cli and then navigate to it via your Expo phone app, any changes you make to the source code while the server is running will automatically be pushed to devices running from the server.
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Gamer Watch Medium Fidelity Prototype
Our prototype was designed to cover the main aspects of our concept. More, specifically, the ability to have multiple profiles, and the ability to keep track of a child's spending, and play time by both game and console.
We tested our prototype with parents of adolecent children to evaluate how usable our prototype was with our target audience and to make sure that our prototype had the features that parents would want out of this style of app. Our prototype testing showed that, while styling needed to be improved as we already knew, that the app addressed all the concerns that parents had in terms of their children’s gaming habits. Our prototype testing also showed that there was an easy to follow flow to the usage of the app that would only improve with better styling.
The major changes between our first and final High-fidelity prototypes were with the styling of the app. Which not only improves its aesthetic but helped improve the usability of the app by better communicating the flow of the app to the user; i.e. showed them what buttons to tap and when. This improvement in styling also aligned the aesthetic of our high fidelity prototype with that of our medium fidelity prototype. The functionality of the app stayed more or less the same with the exception of some minor bug fixes here and there.
Team Leader, User Research and testing, Documentation. As the Team leader it was my responsibility to oversee the project and to enable my group members to work at there best without constraints. In regards to User Research and testing it was my job to come up with the Testing plans we would use to conduct Interviews and Surveys on our Users, synthesize that data and help correlate this data into Useful feedback which could help inform our prototype.It was also my job to make sure our Github wiki was up to date with relevant information and that all materials on the wiki were up to a high standard.
Designer, User researcher and testing. As designer, is was my job to designer and implement the styling into our high fidelity prototype. I also performed interviews with our target audience and helped write up and distribute our online survey for further data collection as well.
Lead Designer, User Researcher and Testing As the lead designer, it was my job to come up with the overall look and feel of the application. In this role, I was responsible for creating the initial wireframes iterations and the medium fidelity prototype while also advising the styling of the functional prototype. I also, in regards to research and testing, initiated the general research survey and conducted testing to help further the applications design.
Designer, Programming, and Testing. As a programmer, it was my job to create the framework for the application inside of react native with the expo framework, as well as implement the graphs that are used to display the data including the styling, animation and interactivity of the graphs. As a designer it was my job to implement the majority of the styling of the app from the backgrounds to the navigation to the colours used, this excludes the buttons, text content and logo styling as they were done by zach. In addition to this I also contributed to creation of the survey as well as populated the data set. Finally I was responsible for ensuring the prototype was usable, ran on both iOS and android as well as deployable for showcase on any device via a url (and expo app).
Visual designer, Academic Research and User Research As a researcher, I was responsible for gathering preliminary research data and user profiles, generating initial system requirements and consulting team members about our users and general context based on the research. As a visual designer, it was my job to collaborate with other members to work on the medium fidelity prototype, design the promotional poster and ensure a consistent style guide across our designs as well as overall aesthetics.