Family Road Trip!

We’ve come a long way since February 2021 when we kicked the project off with a forward-looking activity that captured our imagination of the future. Looking back, the idea of joy and connection remained central throughout our journey.

In our most recent update, we came upon challenges of getting families to participate in our in-car experiments. But we are not going to let anything stop us from learning about our users! We took a hard look at our approach and came up with a new strategy.

1. We realized that parents would prefer to drive their own cars instead of riding in our car. This means we will have to make our prototypes much more adaptable so that they can go in and out of different cars as quickly as possible.
2. Instead of approaching total strangers at parks, museums and playgrounds, we believe that we will have a much better rate of sign-up by reaching out to our network of friends and friends of friends.

Due to the limitation of our own personal networks in Pittsburgh, we explored other locations up and down the Northeast. After a day of messaging, we found that we have the most connections in the Washington DC area. Within the week, 7 families in DC signed up to participate in our experiments for the weekend. We performed surgery on Swervo so it’s modular and adaptable to cars of various sizes and updated our research protocol to allow participants to drive their own cars during the experiment. By Friday, there’s nothing more left to do here except to pack up and hit the road!

Team road trip!

On a stormy Friday afternoon, we took a four-hour drive down to DC with the trunk packed full of our prototypes, emergency materials (duct tape, hot glue, velcro, cardboard…), snacks, fully charged devices, and luggage for a weekend of play-testing with families.

What happens in DC…

Overall, a total of 7 families (24 participants) played with our prototypes in the span of two days. Each family spends about 1 hour playing with the prototypes and talking about their experiences.

During each game, our “wizard” controlled the visual and audio output remotely while the family drives around a prescribed route for the duration of the game.

In between each game, one interviewer and one notetaker will ask the participants about their experiences while our “pit crew” quickly switches out the prototype in their car for the next game. After the first few groups of participants, our team becomes a well-oiled machine.

Overall findings

Watching families interact with our games and break out into smiles and laughter made our assumptions concrete and legitimized our ideas.

Overall, the feedback and reactions from our participants strongly validate our design. Here, are the top-level takeaways:

1. All families said this would be a better use of their time in the car compared to how they are currently using it.
2. We validated our spring research! Many parents spoke about our games as solutions to “lost time” in the car.
3. Both parents and kids spoke about how they prefer collaborating in novel and physical ways to being on their devices.

In addition, we also discovered more nuanced findings:

1. Children’s personality and age have a significant influence on their preference of game dynamics (level of difficulty and amount of physical vs mental effort).
2. Parents do not need to be actively engaged in the game to feel that the experience is enjoyable and meaningful.
3. Auditory feedback is the key to having drivers feel involved in games while limiting distraction.
4. Participants have a strong and established mental model that games are meant for long road trips.

All in all, we saw from our participants’ genuine reactions that all three ideas are worth pursuing further. Yet, as our time in the MHCI program comes to an end it is time for us to wrap up our research.

So, are we there yet?

Through our playtesting, we have proven that the combination of play, unique constraints of the car, and interaction modality is an effective framework for creating novel and compelling experiences in the car for families to foster moments of joy and connection.

We are excited to hand off our design and process with our clients so that they can live beyond our project and have a long-lasting impact on the company’s product strategy.

Work hard, play hard

Now for a behind-the-scenes look at what we did after a day of user testing :)