Zoopany

Role

UX Researcher
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Timeline

March 2023, (1 year)

Research Methods

Comparative Analysis
User Interviews
Systematic Reviews
Moderated Usability Testing
Moderated A/B Testing

Background

Social abuse issues have increasingly been brought up in the games industry workspaces, and they have been difficult to prevent, identify, and navigate.

Problem

Game development students need a more engaging way to understand how to meaningfully navigate these issues when they first enter the games industry, especially when the abuser’s status is higher than the abused.

Goal(s)

Zoopany is an applied game that guides students entering the games industry to:

1. Identify gaslighting
2. Understand the emotional effects of gaslighting on people
3. Provide resources for navigating them

How did we tackle this problem?

This is the process we took to find a solution, outputting:
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• Refined builds of an applied game
• Improved usability
• Data trends showing increasing engagement and empathy within a small sample size

Secondary Research

Comparative Analysis
‍To get a better understanding of how this problem has been addressed, I researched the following products from other companies to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and what could be improved.
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1. HR University's sensitivity training has detailed information but hard to view abused perspective
2. Vantage Point's VR sensitivity training facilitates discussion but is expensive to setup
3. Gamer Girl's Visual Novel Simulation is easy to access but has shallower choices to understand people
4. Smalltalk's Abuse Awareness Simulation is data driven but not interactive

Designing for perspectives

User Flow

We saw that each of our competitors had less opportunity for accessing interactive material for better understanding these topics. We converged with the idea to present different character perspectives to teach how to identify and emotionally connect with these topics.

I created a user flow for presenting this as a narrative experience.

Concept Development

Prototype
‍Our team arrived at two concepts, which were:
1. Moving your character, talking to other characters, and navigating character interactions
2. Presenting images, text, and textual choices to navigate through events

We combined concepts that would accomplish:
• Presenting a narrative by having the user control a singular character
• Talk to other characters
• Discover images as they move their character and explore their workspace

This prototype was a combination of physical and digital. The physical portion represented character navigation, while the digital presented the narrative and UI.

Primary Research

Stakeholder Interviews
‍With our resources at the time, we referred to our classmates and our own experiences in undergraduate courses for determining our target audience.

We gathered existing research sources that prove our intended experience and compared them to our game's usability tests. Our game did not output the same results and we held meetings with our stakeholders to figure out the next best steps. Through multiple interviews, we identified core issues and our goals to close the performance gap.

Desires:• "Clarify who the experience is for."
• "Create an experience that meets both the goals of increasing knowledge and empathy."
• "Maximize the quality of features."

Issues:• Our problem and target audience were not clear.
• We need to assess and adjust our content to ensure meeting our goals.
• Too many goals exist to focus on working on the quality of features.

This defined our goals to guide game development students to:1. Identify gaslighting in the games workplace
2. Generally understand how it makes people feel

Evaluating our project's progress

User Interviews
‍We wanted to understand if our product generates empathy within players, and I created questions to gather qualitative data. This helped us gauge how far we are from reaching our defined goals.

With recruiting online and in-person on the UC Santa Cruz campus, we were able to work with 5 participants.
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Quotes:• "I started associating feelings of hesitancy whenever I saw that character because I would only see my own player with a bit of stress whenever they were around."
• "He comes off as weirdly friendly and chill but then as soon as you get to work, he’s demanding all things that you’re supposed to be responsible for but he didn’t communicate with you well."
• "It becomes more apparent when they’re talking to someone that doesn’t make them anxious, so that’s why when I was playing, the first thing I wanted to do was talk to the other— the character that was nice to me, because it made my character, my player character also not seem like scared or anything..."

Ensuring our content is aligned with goals

Literature Reviews
‍After this, I led the initiative for reviewing our narrative to match the summarized results of our research sources. This would help us figure out how to present it properly to our target audience and align with our defined goals.

Maintaining focus on business results

Product Goals
‍As we worked towards meeting our defined goals, I wanted to make sure we were on track to meeting our instructor's goals who oversaw our project, such as clarifying our target audience, increasing knowledge and empathy, and maximizing the quality of the features.
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Business

Identify target audience
Create experience that increases knowledge and empathy

User

Identify gaslighting
Generally understand how it makes people feel

Shared

Maximize quality of features
Show improvement of knowledge and empathy

Product Features
‍We organized how to develop features that would make the most impact for meeting these goals.
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Research

Literature Review
Usability Testing
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Literature Review
Stakeholder Interviews
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Competitive Analysis
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User Interviews
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Stakeholder Interviews
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Usability Testing
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Priority

Must Haves / Highest

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Nice to Haves / Lowest

Feature

Chapter 1 Fully Implemented
Create Character Placement System
Write all dialogue
Animate all Chapter 1 NPC models
Create navigable office
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Import background music for all interactions
Cutscene Animations
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Reflection Choices

Benefit

Increase quality of experience
Give users choice to understand content
Teach gaslighting
Demonstrate emotional effects
Enable users to learn about people
Emotionally connect to moments with characters
Build emotional connection
Build knowledge about events

Evaluating the design

Usability Testing

Through iterations of builds, I conducted tests for people to complete tasks. I observed user's interactions with the game. As our target audience was game development students, all our tests were conducted with people who had digital skills.

Through these tests, we made adjustments to consecutive builds.

Efficacy Testing

A/B Testing
‍Through in-person and online recruiting, we conducted in-person and online studies with 23 participants, formed closed-ended surveys, and conducted pre-post surveys.

Managing participant expectations:• Communicated that the session would be recorded and that they were going to be interviewed alone
• Reassured participants of their role in the studies but did not include specific details
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Pre-survey:
• Examine the knowledge of gaslighting and empathy towards gaslighting victims

Module:
• Playing the applied game or the industry-standard gaslighting sensitivity training

Post-survey:
• Examine changes in knowledge of gaslighting, changes in empathy towards gaslighting victims, and engagement with each respective module

T-Tests
‍To analyze the pre-surveys and post-surveys from each of the studies, we ran statistical tests.

Paired-Samples T-Test:
• Change in knowledge and engagement were normally distributed

Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test:
• Change in empathy was not normally distributed

We found that the game in comparison to the gaslighting sensitivity training resulted in:1. Showing no statistical significant difference between the game and sensitivity training with regards to knowledge change
2. A positive trend for increasing empathy
3. A statistically significant value indicating more engagement found within the game

With 23 participants, we found that these trends still aligned with our defined goals. As seen in the tables, we can still use more samples to be able to make more meaningful conclusions.

Adjustments

New Features
‍Character Placement System - Users find new or same characters in different places with different dialogue depending on progress of narrative

Reflection Questions - Users answers questions to recall events and what happened to characters

Final Designs
‍We settled with prioritizing that the 3D models be shown first, then being able to see the 2D sprites, and seeing the name and dialogue right after.

Takeaways

1. Perform research earlier
I would make more effort to concisely define who our users are and the problems to address. After ideating right away, I see that it was difficult determining the purpose of our project. If we had started this earlier, I think this would have clarified our purpose, simplified our design, and sped up our development.
2. Empathize with user earlierI would also spend more time trying find other users that we could have addressed and perform my primary research earlier to find the most important problems and solutions sooner. Starting this later affected our efficacy testing and this could be improved to show more meaningful results.