Evaluation of the Interactive Prototype 1

Outcome and Reflection

Before doing the survey, I briefly introduced the concept of the game to the user and then asked them to play the game. Besides, I did not tell them how to interact with the game at the beginning, some users thus were struggling with shooting the bullets. And not until then did I tell them how to shoot the enemy.

The outcome of the user testing and the reflection on each specific question are listed below.

From the feedback, apparently most people had a more concrete and intuitive recognition of the
game than the video prototype. Only two users felt confused about how to play the game and they both wanted some hints to guide the user.


Every user completely understood how to interact with the game and I was happy to see that. One user had no idea how to win the game, which had no relevance with the question but still worth consideration. I think I'll pop up a winning message after the player destroys all the aliens to tackle this problem.



From the pie chart, we can see that more than half of the users thought the attractiveness of the interactions of the game is just around an average grade rather than a full grade, some among those gave me very good suggestions.

- add a timer to count the game time
- add background music
- add a death state to the player
- create difficulty modes

According to the plan, the background music and 'death state' features are what I'm going to incorporate in this game at the refinement stage. The timer idea was good, which might increase the tension of a game to make it more exciting. The difficulty modes are also feasible and suggestive, I just need to develop varies types of enemies with different speed and firepower. This will also improve the user experience because the user will be given options to play the difficulty mode they want.



Problems
- bullet speed is a bit slow compared to the aliens' speed.
- display instructions when destroy all the enemies.
- the player can die.
These problems are completely the same as the problems mentioned in the last section. I won't expand them again.

Concerns of changing the interaction from keyboard input to physical input.
- use the characters instead of numbers
- provide a 'random' instruction on the screen that can be easily perceived even when the player is moving his body.
The second suggestion was really good because based on my observation, even after I told the user
how to shoot, some of them still having trouble pressing the right key. The reason might be that the key code is displayed at the bottom-right corner of the stage and not too big or bright to perceive. I would reconsider where and how to show the random key code in the future game design.

The overall impression of the prototype was good, and most users thought the prototype had grasped the essence of the game concept. However, most of the users thought the prototype is at a medium complexity. I've asked Peter if I need to add more features at this stage because I also thought it was simple, but he told me the complexity was enough for this assignment. Thus, I decided to ignore this feedback.

4 out of 5 testers who had answered the last question misunderstood the question. What I wanted to get was their own experience of building this prototype rather than the suggestions for my prototype. Only one guy said he knew my pain, I think I know who he is.

Effectiveness

The prototype and the testing session are both effective. Although it is a brief version of the final game, it has already covered all the key interactions of the game. The testing session also helped me get some useful feedback that can be applied in the future game such as the timer, difficulty modes, etc. Besides, the observation of how they played the game, how they strugglled with shooting, and other phenomena while they playing the game also gave me a glimpse of the game. For instance, the layout made it difficult for half of the users to perceive the random key code and connect it to 'shooting' operation even after I pointed out there were connections between different elements on the screen.

The testing protocol is more detailed than the last one. I designed 6 groups of questions for this testing session. Based on the reflection on the last testing session, I put more qualitative questions in the survey this time in order to get more constructive feedback. And for this reason, I told the user to skip the questions if they had no clear answers to them to ensure the accuracy of the feedback.

Constraints

The unpolished prototype just implemented part of the functions that covered the key interactions. The testers thus might not have a comprehensive understanding of the game and what will it look like in the future. Fortunately, the game itself was intuitive so there was barely no constraint for the testers to understand or play the game.

Besides, as the survey contains so many questions, and most of which are text questions that need to do more thinking and brainstorming, many testers thus seemed a bit tired of the survey and skipped many questions. You can see from above that the average number of comments for each text question were around 5, which is just half of the testers who did the survey.

Implications

For future projects, I'll add some of the features such as 'audio', 'game restart', 'timer', 'difficulty mode', 'player status', 'real character icon', and 'winning message' to refine it and make it more fun and exciting. Moreover, in order to improve the user experience, the layout, color scheme, and the random key display also need modification.

For future testing sessions, I'll balance the number of the qualitative and quantitative questions. Try not to make it too simple or too boring. Also, I need to reduce the total number of the questions and focus on the key aspects that are supposed to be tested in the current stage. For instance, this interactive prototype 1 is more focusd on the interactions of the game, so the questions for the testing session should be also designed to get the feedback which is related to the interactions.