Level 2 Background Appearance
Designs for the second level of the game will be implemented by team 2 in sprint 3. As the design will be viewed by the user for the entirety of the second level which at this point encompasses half the game it is very important that it aligns with users’ expectations. To do this 2 user testing sessions were held, 1 midway through this sprint to test the draft copy of the design and one 1 week before the end of the sprint to test the final copy. This was done to allow the designers to get user feedback, implement the feedback and then get user feedback on the improved design to understand if they’ve truly met the user requirements.
To test the draft design of the background a user testing session was held. This session had the goal of collecting user response information to the draft design and evaluate what about the draft design can be improved for the final copy.
Due to the type of user information and feedback we wanted we decided to conduct user questionaries and then interviews. The user testing session went as follows:
- Allow the user to view Design for as long as they’d want.
- Give them a questionnaire and leave them alone to fill it out
- Gather all user questionnaire and analyse for trends in data.
- Interview a user with questions related to the trends found in the questionnaire data.
To test the final copy design, the same user test procedure was conducted. This method was chosen as it would allow a 1-1 comparison with the draft and final version designs. The same users would also be used for this reason.
The users were each given 10 minutes to look at the design of the background. After the 10 minutes the users were given a questionnaire (Please see appendix) to complete in private. Once all users had completed the questionnaire, they each handed them back to the session coordinator with the results facing down and left the room. The papers were then shuffled to ensure anonymity and the results were input into an Excel Spreadsheet. These results were then compiled and analysed to find key areas that should be highlighted in the interview.
One user was then selected to perform a quick interview with (as only one user was able to be interviewed due to user time constraints).
The first initial test session ended with a user questionnaire result of 6.2 across all questions. This result was unexpectedly negative and is the lowest result of all users tests this semester which signalled major cause for concern. Further analysis of the results a few key questions contributed heavily to this low result. These were, Questions 3 and Question 4. For this reason, the interview held was based around extrapolating these questions.
After the interviews, the major factors highlighted were that the design felt “more of the same” and that there wasn’t much difference other then the different shading from the first level to the next level which gave the feeling that the level would just repeat itself which bored the players. This feedback was then given to the designers to prepare the final edited version.
The second test session end with a result of 7.24 which is a significant improvement over the initial user test session. Whilst still not the highest mark it did show that the team made good progress improving the design in ways that users recognised and valued. Breaking down the questionnaire results it was found that whilst all questions saw a steady increased over last session, question 3 and 4 were still the lowest scoring. For this reason, the interview was focused on these questions again.
After the interview was conducted the following results were found:
- The end of level two was unclear, there’s no checkpoint or “end” point that indicates the level is over you just hit the wall and the menu pops up
- The theme of red is different than level 1 but the obstacles are the same
- The story of what is happening isn’t clear – why go to the new level? What’s driving the player forward other than the sake of playing the game?
