PilotStudy-Group:Lucky Seven-YutaMorimoto
From CS 160 Fall 2008
Contents |
Introduction
Defend your body is a short game. The game allows our target users who are interested in eating healthy to obtain practical knowledge of food. The game facilitates for the users to learn ingredients of various food in casual way. Game simulates actual human inner body. The users defend the human body eliminating unhealthy food and choosing healthy one with looking nutrition facts of each food. These iterative selections of healthy and unhealthy food make the players get detail knowledge of food and remember impression of each food. Moreover, our user interfaces allow the players to adjust their calorie assumption to actual value and submit a high score. These options have the player fun and interested in game without loss our message of choosing an ideally balanced diet. The experiment we conduct is testing an interactive prototype in one of our target users. In the experiment, we ask her to achieve three tasks to perform a simple usability test and to incorporate the result of the test into design changes. This small test allows us to redesign our project before underlying problem happens on large tests.
Implementation and Improvements
We made some changes to our prototype by checking the result of heuristic evaluation. The followings are what we made at this point.
- Settings Screen
We removed something in setting screen. For example, the checkbox adjacent to the “mouse” label is no longer needed because user would play the game only through mouse. Moreover, we changed the interface of inputting digits on age, weight and height values. We also changed “physical activity” menu to “hours of physical activity per week”. Finally we allow users to apply their setting to gameplay. The values on physical aspects will estimate daily nutrition consumption or required values. We set default values to each nutrition element and the equation to estimate values of daily nutrition assumption such as calorie.
- Game Screen
We added another function absorb food to existed function delete food. The new mode for the mouse allows users to change between delete and absorb mode by pushing the shift and ctrl button on keyboard respectively. If users are in delete mode, food are swallow and absorb it. Thus, absorbing food means the nutrients of the food are added to values at the top left bar which represent the amount of total absorption We changed the mouse roll over on the food to provide textual and graphical information with users. We created multiple waves with increasing difficulty so that users would be encouraged to play game better. Subsequent waves increase speed and the number of food. This increases difficulty for the players.
- Upgrade Screen
We changed some text on mouse rollover of the images of the organs so that they displayed organ’s function in real life as well as in game.We implemented additional score. The additional score displays the total score so far, and old one displays the upgrade points that the player can upgrade each organs spending the score We created repair health function and added button to realize the function in upgrade screen. The function allows user to repair their life in game.
- Highscores
We implemented new highscore screen. In the new one, the all score are automatically sorted in descending order. The new score table has users encouraged and motivated, because they now can see who is the most honorable person.
Method
The participant of the test is 31 years old female who is interested in eating healthy. She just visited in US and has no idea of food around here. This situation may happen when people visit foreign country or strange area. The people are motivated to know unfamiliar food but have limited way to do so. I think this kind of situation occurs in many places, so it is good chance to conduct the prototype test. Moreover, she is a professional game developer and knows various types of games. So she is able to evaluate our prototype not only userability aspect but just game aspect. I conduct test by using laptop which the tester owns. This limited computer resource is applicable for many travelers who have limited computer resource. The test is conducted a café in Berkeley. The café is on the noisy street and test is held at the terrace. This kind of environment is applicable for many travelers at an airport, station or some public building.
Playing the Game (Hard difficulty) This task involves the main goal of our game. This is performed in the main gameplay screen where the player selects a healthy combination of foods ascertaining nutrition facts of each food. The user eliminates the food by clicking on it or passes it through stomach. Once a food exits the stomach, it will be absorbed by the intestines and its calorie, fat, carbohydrates, and protein will be added to the total nutrition in each wave. Since each wave represents a day, the goal of each wave is to allow the desired daily values of the respective nutrients into the body.
Upgrading Organs (Moderate difficulty) At the end of each wave, the game play screen will switch to the upgrade screen. This screen contains the pictures of three organs—heart, liver, and stomach—that can be upgraded by allocating points acquired in game to each organ. Upgrading the organ is a moderate task because the player can upgrade just clicking upgrade button if the points excesses what is needed. Once the user upgrades the organs, he or she can choose to either start the next wave or go to the menu.
Submitting a High Score (Easy difficulty) Submitting score should be easy and pretty straightforward. There are two ways for a player to submit his/her score. One is done when the player quits the game or the player loses the game. If the player wants to quit in the middle of the game, the player must click the menu button and choose the appropriate option to submit his or her score. If the player dies (lose the game), the player is given an option to submit his/her highscore. The process of submitting the score is finished by typing a nickname and clicking submit button.
Procedure
The procedure started with greeting to an attendee. I thanked the interviewer for willingness to participate our test. The user was told about our project and our goal of project. After I explained our project over view, I asked the user to sign a consent form. After the attendee signed consent form, I started to explain details in our game and the tasks that the user needed to complete. This was followed by the some demonstrations, in which I explained some elementary tasks to the user such as showing setting screen and so on. This explanation provides a actual usage with the user. Each task was told with a brief description on why the user should do it. The interviewer was kept from asking questions on the game, after I had explained the overview of tasks. The user was allowed to ask me what the user should do next, if the user would be stuck and lost own way to proceed the game. In most cases, the user interfaces of our game were not explained to examine. The interviewer would accomplish the tasks by herself.
Test Measures
The test includes qualitative and quantitative measures. Qualitative research methods include interviews, observation and directed inquiry. Qualitative measures can describe problems that the user feels and is impressed by our game. So, qualitative measures are very subjective to the user, but they are able to describe underlying problems. On the other hand, quantitative method can show objective values that are very useful to compare the values with other participants on the same test. Quantitative measures are arrived at through environmental and efficiency data. It is qualitative measures that help us make sense of our teams and our environment. The interviewee can describe his/her view of the game during testing so that I can jot down the behavior of the user. The goal of test is to get the whole picture from everyone's viewpoint. The opinions of the player and objective measures help us see his/her concerns to clarify the game.
To meet these different aspects, I used the following things. Qualitative
- A look and feel of the game.
- An impression of the game before star game-part
- An impression of the game after playing game.
Quantitative
- Times of raised a weird voice or speak
- Time taken to submit highscore.
- Time taken to upgrade organs at the first wave
- Time taken to upgrade organs at the second wave
- Time taken to upgrade organs at the third wave
Results
Result of the test is the following. Qualitative A look and feel of the game She said that this game reminded her of a kind of selection game. In such game, user needs to distinguish something that is correct or wrong and decide to select them. For example, in such game, the player may be positioned in any one of the three lanes and is free to move in a first direction from one rung to the next; randomly generated obstacles advance in the opposite direction from rung to rung; the object of the game is for the player to avoid collision with the obstacle or obstacles. This kind of games is very common and has many old examples. So she said comparing such many examples would be useful to improve our game.
An impression of the game before star game-part
She thought that our game just allows user to make some combination of food. However, our game requires the user to make dynamic choices. So she said that it is interesting since many educational games are just focusing on static combination of food. But actual situation, we need to adjust our diet to what we ate before the diet. So our game possibly simulates actual situation.
An impression of the game after playing game. She said that this game allows the user to obtain knowledge of nutrition of each food. However, the game would be useless on increase of food that were coming in each wave. To change difficulty of game, increase of food is good, but increase of food does not contribute for user to obtain information of food. Because, once user compose the ideal balanced diet, the user does not consider absorbing food and only eliminating remained food.
Quantitative
- Times of raised a weird voice or speak*
20 times or more. Especially, almost all complaints or comments are told in game play screen. She mentioned that she can not understand what healthy food is and what facilitate to obtain more highscore.
- Time taken to submit highscore.
About 3 minutes. She is confused how to submit highscore. Because she thought that in almost all games users allow submitting highscore when the users lose the game. However, our game allows the user without losing game. So it confuses her.
- Time taken to upgrade organs
About 30 seconds. This seems very straight forward. She achieves this taks very easily.
Discussion
As described result, the tester mentioned the problem of game-part. She said that at this point users would be confused about criteria to obtain more highscore. Highscore has to encourages the users to play game more long period. So she said our game did not implement such function so far, because users willingly play games and manage to obtain more highscore. The result from trial and error realizes the longer play time of users. We may need to implement clear score calculation method or put score table like that.
She also mentioned more the position of bar charts and effect after user delete or absorb food. At this point, our game did not realize direct feed back to users when they delete or absorb food. Also, the values on bar char at the top left do not realize attentive effects. Moreover, she talked about the position of the bar charts is not appropriate place. Normally score is located at the top left, center or right screen. However, our game requires users to compare the mouse roll over with the bar charts. Therefore the ordinal place of bar charts is not useful for our project.
She had also trouble switching delete food mode and absorb one. At first she did not find the way to absorb food and finally was stuck. This is because we have no clue and help about it and also violates Nielsen's Heuristics H2-10. Moreover, when the player changes the mode, the user just finds little feed back : only text is changed. This little feed back is seriously not helpful for user to recognize the change. So we need to make more feed back effect.
Finally, she commented on our approach for developing game as a professional game developer. She told me about the importance of splitting the source of game development. I also recognized the problem of frame work on our project. I have learned some software engineering frame work, but I have not used such techniques for our project so far.
