WK7 – The first playtest

Summary

Goal: Have a full playtest to find learnings and build Halves presentation.

Challenge: Time is ticking.

Did we fulfill this week’s goals: Yes!

Process

Zoe, Boyi, and Kevin spent this week building a prototype on Invision and playtested with our team. 

Our playtest lasted through 45 minutes. Kevin was the facilitator and we evaluated our experience on both transformational goals and design usability.

Regarding to transformational goals, 

  1. We learned that our story of revealing the different stakeholders’ perspectives prompted us to talk about the gatekeepers of the arts. However, we noticed that being forced to present our personal philosophy right in the beginning of the experience could feel too personal or daunting. For future playtests, we consider assigning roles of stakeholders to players in order to avoid this problem.
  2. Participating in the collaborative art activity with the guerrilla artists allowed us to build a more personal connection to the artist’s work and feel the emotional impact when the artwork was displayed in a surprising context. We additionally consider adding a similar but shorter activity in the beginning of the experience as an ice breaker for the guests to avoid awkward first encounter.
  3. Having a facilitator allowed us to structure the conversations and set the tone for each round of the experience.
  4. During the workshop, we did feel that it was challenging to come up with an art campaign that everyone believed in, which was the frustration that we wanted players to have. However, we consider of giving players clues in the future to make the challenge more manageable.

Regarding to design usability,

  1. We realized that we were sometimes isolated from interacting with each other. This could be because our design was not 100% refined or our lack of experience in running workshops.
  2. Since our prototype was built on Invision app, we found that downloading the app created a high barrier of entry. We consider letting the players download the app prior to the event, or shift from using individual phone to providing a tablet per table with our app being pre-loaded.

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We felt good about the prototype and our direction for Halves. We are going to spend next week preparing for our presentation.