TYPE:
Product Management - Experience Design
SUMMARY:
Delivered a high-fidelity playable prototype of a 3-player arcade-style game with custom-built hardware controllers that raises awareness about the mental and physical experiences of anxiety disorders. Completed as part of Masters’ coursework at the University of Washington.
IMPACT:
Visitors who interacted with the prototype at the public showcase felt empowered to share personal, vulnerable anecdotes of how they personally connected to the topic discussed.
DURATION
8 WEEKS
2024.01 - 2024.03
ROLE
Product manager, facilitator, content designer, researcher
DELIVERABLES
Playable prototype, physical prototypes of controllers
Discovery - 5 weeks
Build a social impact, multiplayer, walk-up-and-play game, with custom hardware controllers - in 8 weeks!
For this project, we looked into mental health as a social impact space:
Globally, an estimated 310 million are affected by anxiety disorders and 280 million individuals are affected by depression (World Health Organization).
Within the US, an estimated 31% and 8% of adults have experienced some form of anxiety disorder and depressive episode at some point in their lives, respectively (NIMH).
We wanted to create an experience that could convey the physical and mental experiences of anxiety, and raise awareness about how we can support those around us who may be going through a tough time.
Desk research into other social impact games and interactive installations
We looked at other social impact games and interactive installations for inspiration and learning. Given the short timeline of the project, we used this as a proxy and the quickest way to orient ourselves to the new space of game/installation design that we were unfamiliar with:
- The importance of physicality: Interactive installations sometimes employed techniques that create intense physical sensations to better convey a message.
- The use of metaphors and abstraction: Games often employed metaphors and abstraction techniques to create moments of interaction within a narrative, especially when touching on sensitive topics such as death.
- The role of haptic feedback: Large scale interactive installations use multi-sensory feedback to make full use of its scale and capture the attention of audiences.
Ideation
At this point, we were still ideating broadly, across topic areas such as water consumption and mental health.
In this process, I shared a metaphor I used previously to explain my anxiety to others.
“In 2017, I found myself in a really dark space mentally, and the best way I could explain it to other people was through a metaphor of being stuck on a tightrope I felt like I was balancing responsibilities and moving forward out of fear of what might happen if I stopped and lost my footing.”
By sharing this story, it helped our team to center on the mental health space, and ideate on ways this metaphor could manifest into a multiplayer, interactive experience
Validating the feasibility and desirability of our idea
We begin validating our idea in terms of feasibility and desirability (as a school project, viability was a lesser concern to us).
Our team took on lead roles that showcased our strengths, assisting each other proactively too.
As Product Manager, I facilitated weekly set-up meetings on alignment, workstream and task prioritizations for the week, asks and blockers. I also facilitated weekly reflections. Prioritization of tasks on our backlog and calling out asks and blockers were extremely necessary for our process due to the short timeline.
We tested our idea in a stepwise manner, using 3 prototyping methods:
- Proof-of-concept rapid prototype
To test if our controller ideas were feasible
- Video prototype
To test if our game concept resonates with people
- Wizard-of-Oz prototype
To test how coherently the game controllers and game concept came together
Validating our solution stepwise in this way allowed us to rapidly iterate before committing to building high-fidelity prototype
We also had long discussions about project direction at this point, asking…
How do we make a game about mental health fun and engaging without making fun of mental health?
How do we make a personal experience relatable without diluting so much that it loses meaning?
How much context do we need to bookend the experience to make the takeaways valuable?
I facilitated structured activities - such as brainwriting, sketching, storyboarding, and timeboxing decisions - to help our team navigate these discussions.
Delivery - 3 weeks
Developing our delivery strategy
We had about 3 weeks to deliver a high-fidelity prototype based on our learnings. I led stand-ups at beginning of each work session (3x a week) during this crunch time, aligning the team on day-to-day goals.
Naturally, there were a lot of things we wish we could still do. Considering time and effort constraints, I helped each teammate prioritize tasks to achieve an overall MVP, mapping out interdependencies between each workstream (usability testing, hardware, software), and clarifying workflows.
Drawing from my background in psychology and communications, I worked on the content design and game narrative concurrently. I also created tutorial screens to onboard players to the experience, incorporating feedback from our testing.
Showcase!
We showcased our playable prototype at an open showcase where members of the public interacted with the game!
The final 3-player game was centered on the tightrope metaphor, incorporating an added narrative of support from loved ones.
Player 1
Uses a wooden balancing pole and a balance board to control an avatar on screen that is crossing a tightrope Tilting the pole left and right moves the avatar to collect positive orbs and dodge negative orbs
We wanted to convey…
- The physical sense of unease and instability that anxiety could cause.
- The mentality shift through darkness to lightness may not always be linear due to positive and negative things affecting us in life.
Players 2 & 3
Use wing controllers to control the wings of owl avatars on screen Moving the wings of the owls help swipe positive orbs towards Player 1, and swipe negative orbs away from Player 1
We wanted to convey…
- We can support those around us by bringing them moments of joy and helping them to navigate negative emotions.
- However, we may not be able to do everything for them, and they would still need to do some navigating on their own.
Showcase visitors especially enjoyed the interactiveness of the controllers and the unique topic. We were the only group in our course to tackle the topic of mental health!
They also enjoyed the multiplayer narrative of friends supporting the main player in overcoming obstacles
What visitors said…
“It was awesome that you were able to make a game that was effective in this space, which is mental health.”
“I liked how you could have friends on both sides of you to help you through your mental journey.”
We imagine the full interactive experience to be housed within an interactive museum, with wireless controllers. We would also explore 1-player and 2-player modes, as the current games requires 3 players to operate.
REFLECTIONS
- Our team of 4 each brought distinctive skillsets to the project, which allowed us to set up our workflows like a product team. The time pressure was also immense, which allowed me to hone my ability as the PM to accurately assess priorities and timelines, align the team on daily and weekly goals, and facilitate open and respectful communication when there were differences in opinion.
- I realized I could apply many skills from my past work in research management too. In that role, I was constantly translating between policy jargon, communications jargon and operations jargon to align cross-departmental colleagues on research questions, working together with them to prioritize projects, and helping my team to juggle and prioritize research tasks for concurrent projects - much like how I was connecting research, design, and engineering workstreams of this project.
- Validating solution and prototypes step-by-step from lo-fi to hi-fi was very helpful. We were able to refine and elevate the experience with each round of testing, with reduced redundancies and wasted work.
