4/20 Speed Dating and Our Next Step
What we get from our speed dating activity and what we plan to do next.
Speed Dating
As mentioned in our last post, we generated illustration and flows to help us walk through our learning experience with other teams during speed dating. Specifically, we started by giving our context —
Recap — our context
Who — our target learners are soon-to-be graduated students.
What — we aim to teach financial literacy (including taxes, credit cards, etc) at low stake level by telling learners how different decisions would affect their futures, and thus become critical thinker when making financial decision.
When — we want our learning to be preventive, so ideal learners would use our tool before the critical moments when they need to make decisions and our tool would be a less stressful game that simulate future decision making process. However, we do plan to have feature for users to locate to specific chapters and review specific terms/knowledge.
Where — we designed our tool to be mostly digital (while acknowledging that in the future there are opportunities to add in physical card game feature and to allow team play). A question we asked during our speed dating was whether this digital application would be better on mobile screen or computer screen.
Why — the reason we feel it is important to teach these information was that making financial decisions were inevitable in everyone’s lives. It would be helpful to have a taste before making real decisions so that one would be acquiring essential knowledge without risk and be less stressful in the future.
The Flow & Storyboard
Then, we used our sample task flow and corresponding storyboard to walk through our game design, with an emphasis on one specific learning chapter.
This is the sample chapter sequence we used in our speed dating.
The Question and Feedback
We asked our speed dating partners to give suggestion on the medium, to evaluate out chosen concept, and to evaluate the coherence of the flow of the game. Here are some key insight we received:
- Computer Screen is preferred over mobile screen because
1)we seem to plan to provide a lot of information at the same time
2) it seems like a game that one would want to sit down and play, not a game that you would randomly play as you walk
2. The flow and the concept make good sense because of the illustration and task flow
3. Other considerations and suggestions
- Personalization:
To what extent do we allow users to customize their game experience to represent their actually financial situation? By allowing them to input their actual income? And system give suggestions about how much to save per month?
Our consideration on that was, we can’t do everything at the same time. Giving that we are designing a game for students, we do not emphasize the calculation function or other functions you can find in a utility tool. However, based on the structure of the game, we can totally convey the knowledge of allocating income in the investment chapter, where we would teach the risk and benefit of different type of investment choice, including depositing to saving account.
Can users jump directly to content they are interested in? Say if I am more interested in tax, can I see that only?
Yes, we mentioned this in our earlier brainstorming that maybe in our on-boarding session users can test their knowledge and indicate their preference, and we would design different track for different kinds of learner.
2. Trust Building is Important:
Big factor on the success of the experience is building trust and seeing the value in it, showcase trustworthy sources
Based on this feedback, something we considered to do was to add resource link to showcase our credibility. Given the limit of our game, including these resources can also help users to dive deep into content they are more interested in later.
3. Illustration Style to Make the Content Less Tedious
Now there seem to be a lot of content. Maybe you should find a way to make sure the content would not be too tedious and be clearly presented.
We also realize that the visual design and styles would play a significant role in making our game successful. Therefore, we created several mood board as a start to think about the visual aspects.
Next Steps
Based on the feedback we got and our mood board exploration, we started to prototype screens of the chapters. The first set of pages we are working on include the pretest page, the learning page, and the application page of Housing Chapter.
