What if there was a game to help people understand the Product Design community?
“Hey there, are you an individual curious about Product Design? Well, rest assured: this game will keep you informed about all the things you need to know about the Product Design industry!”
Game is not something that crossed my mind when I looked at the title of the course, “Entrepreneurial Design”. I imagined the class would kick off with an introduction to business models and entrepreneurial thinking. Well, I was wrong because our first project for this class was all about games.
Growing up, especially with my strict parents, games never had a good connotation to me. Immediately, I think of video games such as League of Legends, Fortnite, Battle Ground, Overwatch, and some grim news about game addictions. So it took me some time to debrief and think outside of these perspectives.
Fortunately, after a round of in-class and independent exercise, I was able to come up with an industry or a demographic I wanted to design a game for–people curious about the Product Design industry!⚡️
As a product designer, I often find myself struggling to explain what it is that I do to my friends and family, mainly because it’s a relatively new industry, and thought it would be interesting to create a low-barrier way to help people understand the industry. Moreover, as the Product Design industry is becoming more saturated every year, I thought it would be a fun problem space to design for.
Audience 👩🏻💻
A game designed for both educational and social purposes
Initially, the game idea was created with my friends and family members with no design background in mind to help them understand what it’s like to be a Product Designer. However, I also wanted this game to be played among product designers during meetings as a team-bonding exercise. Perhaps, it could be used as an icebreaker when there is a new designer joining the team!
Some initial research 👀
After a short Googling session, I knew that there could be a better way to break learning about the Product Design industry. For my next step, I dived in to understand the target audience (and their goals) and some initial competitive analysis to get a sense of the industry landscape.
Mentoring and networking platforms🔮
I believe the biggest competitor in the market that resembles my idea is mentoring platforms that, on the bottom-line, connect experienced designers and people curious about the industry based on interest and expertise. As an individual who actively took advantage of these platforms, I knew that these mentoring platforms were helpful for receiving professional feedbacks but weren’t exactly made to help people grasp the subtleties and the culture of the industry.
Here is a list of some of the mentoring and informational platforms in the market and their highlight feature:
UX-related Medium: UX Collective, UX Planet, Muzli, etc. are among the myriads of Medium publications specializing in UX and Product Design.
adplist.org: Mentoring platform where users can actively reach out to industry mentors. Users can also browse and filter mentors by country, company, and LOE.
LinkedIn: Social media platform for professional networking. Users can interact with each other through posts, live videos, stories, and private messages (cold-emailing).
From this brief competitive analysis, it seemed that all these platforms do a good job of providing professional information regarding how to land a job, reviewing projects, and giving career advice. This made me even more certain that providing a casual, low-barrier way of understanding the Product Design community is necessary.
Games 🧩
As the next step, I looked for games with an icebreaker element that can be played in a setting where you getting to know new people.
We’re Not Really Strangers Card Game (4.7): Bunch of prompts to help people bond. Mostly positive reviews but there are some negative reviews saying the game was boring as well.
Icebreaker Deck (5.0): Reviews mention “great for deepening interactions w/ co-worker and family alike”, “best purchase during the pandemic”, and “great for meetup groups”.
Cards Against Humanity: “Cards Against Humanity is a party game for horrible people” (from the website). Each round, one player asks a question from a black card, and everyone else answers with their funniest white card.
Now the details 😛
After a quick research, I felt I had a pretty good idea of what type of game I wanted to create. In contrast to the game I’ve looked at, a game I wanted to design needed to be informative and educational elements as well. So here it is, a rough outline of the game.
Rules: Similar to my games I've researched, it will be a card game format with prompts to get the conversation going. Each person will take turns drawing the card. A person who draws the card will read out the prompt and the other person will be answering them.
Goals: To understand each other better and have a relaxing and fun moment together but also to learn something about Product Design!
Chance: The fun part is that you don’t know which prompt you’ll get.
Making the game 🧠
Moving on to the design phase, I asked myself: since there are so many fun games out there, why reinvent the wheel completely? Instead, I felt it would be a good starting point to take ideas from established games and build on top of it.
So I resorted to Card Against Humanity and created my own Product Design version. Of course, I wanted to add features that differentiated my game from it, which is why I created a new type of card that covers the educational aspect of the game.
Yellow cards 💛: These are the prompt cards. The moderator picks out one yellow card. The moderator will read out each of the white cards presented by the players and pick the best one.
White cards 🤍: These are the answer cards. Each player will draw five of these cards and each turn will play one card that best matches the yellow prompt card. The player whose card was picked out by the moderator will win the point.
Grey cards 🖤: These are the question cards. These cards are mixed into the prompt card deck and will not require white cards. Whenever the moderator picks out the grey card, everyone can participate to answer the question. The first one to answer the question correctly wins the point.
Iteration a.k.a playtesting 👾
Once the details of the game were ironed out, it was finally time for playtesting. The goal here was to reach out to people outside of my network for usability testing to gather honest feedback and insights. Reaching out to people wasn’t too difficult, thanks to my design friends and LinkedIn network.
In fact, the biggest hurdle here was facilitating the game with strangers in a virtual (Zoom) environment. So I had to get creative as designers always do. One idea I wanted to try out was playing games on Figma, which is a collaboration tool loved by designers all over the world. Figma allowed multiple players to join the file and updates instantly so that everyone can keep track of the game in real-time.
While playtesting the game on Figma, one feedback I received helped me think about ways to better take advantage of Figma’s native features such as Pages.
Reflecting back 🤓
What went well: Because the framework of the game was taken from a Cards Against Humanity known and played by a large audience, players quickly got the hang of the game.
What could have been improved: Given the timeline of the class, I was only able to test the game with product designers. I would love to playtest with students and my family members who aren’t from a design background.
