Creating a card game to gamify the Product Design Process
Know Your Process — The fun way to test your design process
Here at Digital Detox, we’ve developed and released Know Your Process, a card game to help your team understand the product design process and launch a product your target users will love.
Do you know if your team can successfully launch the product following the correct product design process? Or will you fail right before product rollout? Do you know all the steps to guarantee success?
The game will help you find answers to these questions. It takes 5 minutes to learn, up to 30 minutes to play, and it takes 2–4 players.
The game consists of the Process cards deck and the Action cards deck. Process cards identify the steps of the product design process, whereas Action cards identify conditions that may influence the product design process.
The Double Diamond
The game teaches you about the product design process, specifically about different iterations of the Double Diamond model created by the Design Council. The model is divided into four phases: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver.
The Discover phase covers the start of the project and includes research and collecting different possible insights on the problem. Some actions taken in this phase include market research, competitor analysis, tech research, user research, ethnographic studies, etc.
The Define phase represents the synthesis of the data that was gathered during the Discover phase. The goal here is to define a clear design brief that frames the fundamental design challenge. In this phase teams come up with UX and marketing personas, market opportunities, content strategy, etc.
The Develop phase is where the solutions or concepts are created, that includes branding, UI components, copywriting, motion and interaction design, and prototypes are created to test and iterate on.
The Deliver phase is a final stage, where the resulting project is finalised, validated, produced and launched.
Card Design
The game consists of two decks: the Process cards deck and the Action cards deck. Process cards identify steps of the product design process, whereas Action cards identify conditions that may influence the product design process.
There are 50 process cards in the deck. Each process card identifies a deliverable that is part of one of the four phases. There is a little description of what that deliverable requires, as well as the number of points one can get collecting the card.
There are 50 action cards in the action card deck. Each of these cards identifies a condition that may influence the work process, and change the sprint line order, or other players’ hands.
After a few rounds of iterations, we came up with the final anatomy of cards, boards, their designs and illustrations. We also playtested it a few times to come up with the optimal scoring points for each card, as well as the necessary amount of cards in each phase of the Double Diamond model.
Gameplay
The objective of the game is to get the most points by collecting process cards during the 3 sprints.
Gameplay is divided into 3 sprints. On each sprint, 10 process cards are placed on the Sprint burndown board. On their turn, players play an action card from their hand, rearranging the order of the Sprint line. Players then are collecting a process card at the next impending week day on the sprint line, as a representation of what their team delivered by that day of the sprint. The sprint continues until all the cards are taken. At the end of the third sprint, whoever collected cards with the most points wins!
On their turn, a player has to:
- Play an action card. (Action cards allow to move process cards forward and backwards on the Sprint burndown board, draw extra cards, etc.)
- Collect the next impending week day card in the Sprint burndown line. (Process cards are worth varying points displayed in the bottom right corner.)
- Draw a new action card.
Play continues in this manner until there are no process cards left on the Sprint burndown board at the start of someone’s turn. That sprint is then over and the new sprint begins.
When the third sprint is over, each player counts up the points on their process cards and action cards that might add to the overall score. Whoever has the most points wins!
Ready Prototype One
We went through a few iterations of the game and playtested after each iteration to gain insights and refine the gameplay.
Now we have a high-fi prototype, ready to playtest with people outside Digital Detox to assess how much players can learn from it. That’s an invite — if you’re in Brixton, come say hi and play with us!
If you want to find out more about the game, get in touch at anastasiia.kucherenko@gmail.com.
