Findings
- The overall UI and aspects are very navigable, and very straightforward. I find that the hitboxes are occasionally slightly weirdly placed however they aren’t that bad
- Prefer a more accessible/readable font instead of the pixel-style font on most pages
- I also really like the designs, such as this Persona Trial as it encompasses a large number of positive design choices such as multicolored buttons as well as using different fonts, colours, and text sizes to make the important parts actually pop out
- I dislike how it seems that you can interact with the middle such as the town square but there is no hitbox so I just get baited into spamming e onto a thing that doesn't exist
- When progressing into the wayfinding world, the background doesn’t switch to that of the wayfinding world, instead it stays on the backdrop of the Identity forge, despite the interaction points still being present.
- For reference this is what the Wayfinding World looks like
- Upon answering all the questions, the user is still stuck in the Empathy Epic, with lacks a clear way to exit back to the wayfinding world, or to progress to next steps.
- Furthermore, having the character move by following the user’s cursor could be confusing, as it is inconsistent with the rest of the game, where it is controlled by keyboard. Furthermore, the user needs to move their mouse to answer the questions, making mouse controlled movements even less practical.
- Adding an option to change between keyboard movement and mouse movement would likely be best as the systems for both are already existing.
- Upon completing the sprint success module in the Wayfinding World, the user receives a score of 0/3 on two sections: timeline planning and problem breakdown. This is despite successfully answering the questions and being permitted to progress.
An overall design note
Generally, I’d recommend a complete rethinking of the entire game design. Why are we using a minigame in order to complete a critical registration process already bound to run into multitudes of errors, wherein encapsulating all of that within a game just makes the process so much harder? There’s a lot of questions that need to be answered before the development team continues: Why even run an entire game engine to complete the process, when interactive webpages would be much simpler and frankly more efficient in completing the task at hand? Why generate LLM content to create inauthentic dialog with a user (probably new to CS) which will likely just weird them out? I understand that there’s a point in using a game for the sake of maintaining the game itself, but the general handling of design/implementation makes the process a generally dismal experience for new users. Help the user understand the “why” of each step they go through (personas, face scanning, etc.), and make the UI/UX more open to people. The point of the game was to make the registration process more widely engaging and accessible, but the current design and vision of the game don’t seem to align.
Findings
An overall design note
Generally, I’d recommend a complete rethinking of the entire game design. Why are we using a minigame in order to complete a critical registration process already bound to run into multitudes of errors, wherein encapsulating all of that within a game just makes the process so much harder? There’s a lot of questions that need to be answered before the development team continues: Why even run an entire game engine to complete the process, when interactive webpages would be much simpler and frankly more efficient in completing the task at hand? Why generate LLM content to create inauthentic dialog with a user (probably new to CS) which will likely just weird them out? I understand that there’s a point in using a game for the sake of maintaining the game itself, but the general handling of design/implementation makes the process a generally dismal experience for new users. Help the user understand the “why” of each step they go through (personas, face scanning, etc.), and make the UI/UX more open to people. The point of the game was to make the registration process more widely engaging and accessible, but the current design and vision of the game don’t seem to align.