Collaborative Elements
Online Reality Games Evaluation: Design Challenges and Lessons Learned
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Juan Oreste Braga De Oliveira, Wilson Silva Prata
A major challenge when evaluating game usability is to differentiate usability problems from the difficulty inherent in the challenge that the player must face in order to master the game. Overall, our experience has shown that usability issues (such as lack of consistency or use of mental models that disregard the player's cultural baggage) often interfere with the player's learning curve, making the playing experience difficult. To deal with issues like this, the professional who plans and runs the tests needs to work close to the game designer. In our game evaluations, we usually involve game designers in all phases of research, from the definition of research questions and hypotheses, to the conduct of the tests. Our experience has shown that this approach has served to improve the engagement of the team as a whole around issues related to player experience (UX).
Warm Up!: An Experimental Project on Design For Social Innovation And Urban Regeneration
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tatiana Aleksandrova, Gianni Denaro, Mariia Zolotova
The research aims to share the results from “Warm Up” Workshop - an experimental project held by Ph.D Product Design students from Sapienza University of Rome in collaboration with Saint Petersburg University (SPbU) - involving students from SPbU’s Graphic Design Master Degree Program. The objective is to investigate the topics of Design for Social Innovation and Design for Public Space in the social context of Vasilievskij Island in Saint Petersburg. Students were asked to propose a concept for a project that could improve the social experience of the users in that specific area of the city. The experimental and innovative aspect of the workshop is due to the fusion of methods and approaches typical of Product Design, such as the Human-Centered-Design, and the Avant-Gard heritage of Russian School, in order to design an improvement of the social experience through the tool of storytelling. By illustrating their concepts of products/services, they have developed a new practice in between the fields of Product Design and User Experience. The final result is to serve a hypothetical urban regeneration in terms of Social Innovation, designing the user experiences as storyboards with the classical structure of “before and after”. The storyboards were organized in a book that would narrate the final change in users behaviors. By “Research through Design” method, the workshop has evaluated a practice to enter in a new field of design through already-met tools, achieving the above mentioned objective.
