capstone project - supporting reflective learners in fast-paced, competitive environments

Year long capstone project. The focus was determined by each student individually.

problem space

There are many learning situations in which novices find themselves lost, confused, and without help. These situations range from learning software such as Adobe Photoshop, creating a profile for an online dating site, trying to figure out how to work your new KitchenAid orange juicer, to countless other such situations.

The specific space I chose was that of novice players of competitive video games. Not only are such games a passion of mine, but the video game industry is one of the leading realms of experience design, another passion of mine.

core of the problem

Rarely if ever do competitive games give novices tools to help them reflect on their experiences. Because they can't view their experiences wholistically and systemically, they have trouble seeing ways for themselves to improve.

literature review

I began with looking at sources specifically about competitive video games. In particular, David Sirlin's work on what makes a 'scrub', blogs of players who had taken up StarCraft competitively, and Kurt Squire's work with looking at competitive video games (Civilisation IV) as an instructional environment.

Next I read sources about reflection, from theoretical pieces like Schon's The Reflective Practitioner and Nelson & Stolterman's The Design Way to practical applications of reflection in Human-Computer Interaction by Nakakoji & Redmiles and Stephen Edwards.

primary research

I began by having a few participants keep informal diaries of their attempts to learn a new, competitive game. I asked that they simply take a short time to write about their experience with learning or playing that game at least once a week, and kept track of their progress for a few weeks. I used these diaries as an exploratory way to corroborate some of the insights I had read in online blogs, as well as to see more closely how individuals' personalities affect their learning process.

I conducted structured interviews with players of the PlayStation 3 fighting game BlazBlue using footage of each subject playing. Footage of the participants was taken at a session where the participants played each other in a casual, unstructured manner. The interviews were constructed based on individual participants' play.

The interviews were aimed at identifying how novices speak about not only their own play, but the play of others. By digging deeply into how novices conceptualize the their playing experiences as well as the theory behind their choices, I began to extrapolate insights directed at creating a space for novices to play, learn, and have fun constructively.

concept generation

I used personas to generate a few exploratory concepts. By developing these early concepts as scenarios, I was able to explore the problem space from a new perspective and gain many insights about the experientiality of the concepts. As well, the deliberate nature of sketching an entire scenario allowed me to consider not only one concept per scenario, but also create diverging paths of 'alternate' concepts to handle the myriad issues that came up during sketching.

Afterwards I decided to move on to a style of sketching that generated a larger number of concepts, but didn't go into as much detail for each individual one. By simply sketching a visualization of the design and identifying some of its key aspects, I could quickly produce many concepts that all dealt with different aspects of the problem space.

prototyping and iteration

By constructing a quick, paper prototype and showing it to a few people, I was easily able to find a few structural problems with the flows I had designed, and was able to simplify and refine the interaction through some quick iteration. Through these insights I was able to create a more accurrate, higher-fidelity prototype in Adobe Fireworks that I could put in front of real users to discover their attitudes towards it. By running usability tests and constantly iterating on the prototype, I was able to hone the design and continually augment it with new findings and insights.

capstone paper (.pdf, 14MB) available here

personas and storyboards (provided below)

concepts (provided below)

selected prototype frames (provided below)

	The user has chosen to find a rival to play with for 1 hour.
	The user is choosing how long he would like to play with a rival.
The user is viewing available players, based on his/her selected play time.   The user is viewing the metadata results of the match he/she just played.