04/20 Prototyping & User Testing Plan

🔷 Value Flow:

Before starting prototyping, we talked about how the competition aspect of our learning experience will be structured and what the value flow will look like. We imagine that organizations sponsor monthly future prompts that are then presented on our platform. In return, organizations receive a portfolio of ideas generated by students. Students get a fun learning experience and by participating they actually help to solve real-world complex problems.

Value Flow for our learning experience

🔷 Prototyping Board:

3D VS. 2D
Our initial idea was to have a 3D board in the shape of an iceberg. However, through our feedback round and also while prototyping we realized it won’t be the most practical — sticking the cards into a 3D iceberg could become finicky and unintuitive. Additionally mapping a 3D board onto a 2D digital guide could become confusing for our learners because of the mental model shift they would have to make.

Initial exploration of the board layout

Therefore we decided to go with a 2D board, we also decided to change the layout to show more of a journey that the players progress along. Because this way it would be clear for the learners where they are and where they are headed. Allowing them to create a mental model of the experience. This board journey is revisited in our conclusion and the takeaway portion of the game which is described later on.

Chosen board layout: 2D journey map

🔷 Wireframes of the online guide:

In this section, we will walk you through the 6 phases of our learning experience by showing the initial wireframes for the online guide. We have decided for our online guide to live on an application for an iPad or tablet. Our exploration of the pros and cons for each screen size is visualized below.

Pros and cons of different screen sizes and devices.

The 6 phases of the experience are:

1. Introduction and context setting
2. Selecting Stakeholder roles and requirements
3. Causal Layered Analysis
4. Brainstorming barriers & ideas
5. Idea selection & evaluation
6. Journey conclusion & takeaways.

We will now walk you through the initial wireframes for each phase:

🔸 Introduction and context setting:

The purpose of the introduction is to set the context for the students. First, they are introduced to who (which organization) wrote out this month's challenge. Then the goal of the experience is introduced, after which they are prompted to ‘accept’ or ‘decline’ the challenge. Once they accept, the team has to decide if they want to work with a preferred or unpreferred future. In our scenario, the team chooses the preferred future, and they are introduced to the game master that will guide them through the experience. Finally, they are given a video to watch of the CLA of that future, this CLA will also act as the example CLA later on in the journey.

phase 1: introduction

🔸 Selecting Stakeholder roles and requirements:

The next step in the experience is to divide the stakeholder roles, the students press ‘generate stakeholders’ and stakeholders are randomly assigned to each of the students. They are then prompted to grab a post-it and write down what their stakeholder would want to achieve, their requirements. Before starting they are given a short explanation of why understanding stakeholder requirements is important. When they finish writing their stakeholder requirements the system asks them to take a photograph of their postits — they are then converted to digital text allowing the players to rank them according to priority.

phase 2: stakeholders and requirements

🔸 Causal Layered Analysis:

This is the most difficult part of the journey because it involves the most technical terms such as Causal Layered Analysis, Litany, Causes, Worldviews & Metaphors. This phase starts by showing the students the example CLA of the future world in the beginning. Then they are required to listen to different articles of the current world sort of like a podcast. These two steps give the students the initial information they need to dive into the analysis exercise. They are shown an interactive iceberg with 4 layers: Litany, Causes, Worldviews & Metaphors. When they click on each of the layers they are given a brief explanation of what that layer signifies — and then they are encouraged to browse through the world-building cards of that layer and chose 4 cards that best represent their current world. When they have selected 4 cards for each layer (and 5 for the causes layer, because there are 5 STEEP forces) they are prompted to take a photograph of their end result on the board game. This is then held next to the example CLA, which signifies the start of phase 4: brainstorming barriers and ideas.

phase 3: Causal Layered Analysis (CLA)

🔸 World-building cards:

There are 4 stacks of worldbuilding cards, one for each layer of the CLA. The litany cards will have an image and a headline similar to a newspaper layout. The cause cards will be divided into 5 segments: social, technological, economic, environmental, and political. The worldview cards will be formatted similar to a persona: with an image of a person, a description of the worldview, and a quote. Finally, the metaphors will be a large image (a picture says more than 1000 words) and the metaphor in the text below.

World-building cards belonging to phase 3: CLA

🔸 Brainstorming Barriers and Ideas:

After finishing the CLA and seeing both the current and future CLA presented next to each other. The next task is to brainstorm the barriers that we would need to overcome to move from the current world into that preferred (or unpreferred) future. This brainstorm session is timed to create a sense of urgency. And after they finished they are asked to record the barriers that they want to try and overcome. These barriers are then placed as a new brainstorming session of how might we questions: how might we overcome barrier 1? how might we overcome barrier 2? etc. They write the how might we questions in the center of a piece of paper and divide the papers amongst themselves. A two-minute timer is set and they have to brainstorm solutions to overcome the barrier on the paper in front of them. After the two-minute timer is up they pass their paper to the right of them and receive a piece of paper from the person to the left of them and the process repeats until everybody has brainstormed for each barrier. The final step of this phase is to take a photo of all their ideas written on the paper.

Phase 4: brainstorming barriers and ideas

🔸 Idea selection and evaluation:

With the photograph of ideas surrounding the barriers to overcome it is now time to vote and evaluate the ideas. Each player gets three dots which they can digitally place on the photograph next to the idea(s) they think are the strongest. The application then calculates which ideas have the most votes, the top three ideas are then held next to the ranking of the stakeholder requirements that were established earlier in the journey and evaluated accordingly. The idea that comes out of this test with the best score is dubbed the winner.

Not yet resolved: how to allow users to go back a step and edit and improve on the ideas?

Phase 5: idea selection and evaluation

🔸 Journey conclusion & takeaways:

The last step of the game is asking the students if they want to submit their idea to the competition. They are also presented with a digital takeaway of the journey they just completed.

Phase 6: Journey conclusion & takeaways

🔷 Test plan:

Who?
Individual testing of 3 participants. 2 from CMU and 1 external participant.

Agenda [1 hr]

1. Initial interview/survey — setting the initial state [10 min]
2. Give a preview of the game [10 min]
   a. show them frame highlights
   b. walk them through example CLA
3. Ask them to do CLA activity [25 min]
4. Ending interview [15 min]

Initial Interview questions:

• Do you know about systems thinking?
• Wicked problems?
• How do you approach solving a complicated problem?

Post-test Interview questions:

• What did you learn?
• Do you feel more equipped to tackle wicked problems?
• Did you enjoy the activity?
• What did/didn’t you enjoy about the experience?
• What would make it more engaging?
• Would joining a competition be a motivational factor for you?