WIT-Y GAMES

Lots of women in the technology field leaving their jobs in mid-career. This is unusual in the technology sector and is not present in any other sectors such as law or business. This project “Women in Tech” is to create intervention games to help mid-career tech women in to stay in the industry.

Meow Manager is an online game and social networking app designed specifically with women in Tech in mind. We created this game to help women in tech to stay in the field and be more successful!

MY ROLE

We used contextual design techniques to design and implement a social networking game to help mid-career tech women balance work and life. I conducted contextual interviews to learn the needs of potential users, worked with stakeholders to generate game design ideas, led the team to produce all main deliverables, including storyboard, concept board, paper prototype, user environment design diagram, and an H5 demo, and conducted usability test to evaluate the design.

WORK IN AN AGILE TEAM

I worked collaboratively with a cross-functional team that includes the developer, project manager, and content manager. We had meetings two times a week from 2 pm-5 pm on Monday and Thursday. We had a quite diverse team and established our own team manifesto!

PRODUCE MAJOR DELIVERABLES

I led the team to produce our major deliverables, including the following:

Concept boards
storyboards
paper prototypes
User interface design pattern
User environment design diagram

MAKE UX STRATEGY

I worked with other two team members to make our UX strategy and conducted 2 rounds usability testing (paper mockup interviewing).

The approach

Contextual Design is a user-centered design process built upon in-depth field studies to drive innovative design.

We used a modified contextual design approach to come up with our game ideas.

We analyzed and presented user data, drove design ideas from data, design games as solutions, and iterated games with users.

Design process

For this project, we used agile development method.

1. CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY

We conducted face-to-face contextual interviews with women working in the technology industry and found out the key issues they face in the workplace based on the stories they told.

2. INTERPRETATION SESSION

We did our interpretation sessions after interviews. The session was considered as a debrief process. The interviewer shared the interview experience with the rest of the team and interpreted the data collected during the contextual inquiry. We captured key issues from the interviewer’s notes.

3. AFFINITY BUILDING

In order to organize field data and arrange the notes from interpretation sessions, we built affinity diagram to reveal women’s key issues in the tech field. It is a very simple way to organize unstructured data. We grouped individual notes based on the categories of issues.

4. VISIONING

During the visioning session, we have already developed various “hot ideas” and shared those ideas on the wall. We voted and finally sketched ideas for four online games and one board game: Meow Manager, Decorate Office, Office Maze, Moonbase, and Career Path. Also, we listed all the technologies we might use in the later development stage, such as Bluetooth, touch screens, and gesture control. In the visioning session, we weaved our “hot ideas” into stories.

5. STORYBOARDING

We built storyboards for “Meow Manager (Company Cats)” to describe how people will perform target activities in our games. We drew a different storyboard for each scenario in our game to show how specific user activities and situations will be handled in the game and show how those activities will be achieved.