MA Interactive Multimedia @ Bath Spa University

Usability Group Project: Evaluation & Reflection

This group project was set by Gordon Plant early this semester, by a majority decision the brief was to create a game for kids aged 5-8 teaching them to read music.

This was a completely new target audience for me to design for which I found interesting and as some group members have children in the a.m age group, looking for participants to take part in usability testing was another thing we wouldn’t need to worry about.
After all this was just going to be a small 50% project – or so we thought…

My initial research looked at the psychology of educational design, some examples of kids’ games and instruments and also general Usability guidelines & ones specifically aimed at Kids.

The general idea was to use a growing tree as an incentive for children to name the correct notes on the stave.
While I tried to point out that in my opinion involving animals would be much more engaging (most kids love animals and associate them with a tangible experience e.g. in a zoo or with a pet/fury toy most kids have a favourite animal but not a favourite plant or tree; an animal makes noises, interacts, has a face and is cute whereas a plant, to a kid with a short attention span , is just „there“ and either grows or doesn’t.) the game was developed further in this direction.

Initially we used a wiki as a development platform which was set up by Mike and also administered by me to a certain degree as I wanted to ensure it is clearly and concisely layd out for aesthetic reasons and the sake of clarity; I also helped some members posting their entries to the correct pages which wasn’t always as straight forward as it should be.

Eventually the group decided to switch from the rather clunky wiki platform to a collaborative group blog which I volunteered to set up.

Although the a.m tasks did not directly relate to the game I feel it was important to administer both the wiki and the blog, I spent a fair amount of time doing so, half an hour here and there being gone in no time doing related tasks.

I always contributed with ideas and feedback to any group discussion and feel I made some good points in the process. I did not always agree with group decisions but such is the nature of a collaborative project, most situations at work aren’t any different.

I think the group collaboration overall was good, although sometimes I would have wished for some more “positive vibrations” in times of stress.
There where many E-Mail discussions, comments left for each other on the blog and iChat sessions to push the project further.

Generally I sensed the willingness with every group member including myself to contribute to the project was potentially jeopardized by the pretty vague scope and weighting for a 50% project. I think we all missed a clear direction with regards to what is enough work to get a good grade for a project like this.
It was also a great shame that we only had Gordon’s support and input for 5 weeks as I personally found all his sessions ,also looking back to the PGCert,
very inspiring and interesting.

The game went through many steps in the design process both regarding structure and interface, it was tested on a live target audience twice and was scrutinized in terms of accessibility guidelines repeatedly. Every group member contributed to these steps and added to the amount of rich research.

Without sounding too pompous I would say that I was the driving force in pushing the interface of the game to where it is today. There was a time when the general group morale was pretty low but I insisted on working further on the interface to bring it to a visually pleasing and target audience relevant stage and volunteered to do so on my own. I am not sure I would have done so if I would have known about all the major very time consuming issues that crept up after that ominous decision. Actually I am sure I wouldn’t, although I am quite pleased with the final outcome.

The mainly PowerPoint related production issues and personal rants are well documented on the group blog and my personal conclusion is that while
PowerPoint may be a good island solution for creating a “quick and dirty” mock-up running on the machine that it was created on it is an
absolute nightmare once different platforms,versions,linked media,codecs and machines with different specs come into the equation.

If I knew what I know now beforehand, using Flash would have been much more convenient and less frustrating/non value added time consuming.

Overall the amount of work,testing,frustration and development put into this project by everybody would have been enough for a 100% project and while I am pleased with the final product this does leave a sour note especially when I see that my other Uni assignments (Networked Design and Personal Project in particular) suffered considerably.