Design Journal Series: Week 1
Class: Feb 7, 2020
[As part of my design thinking class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education this Spring, I’m exploring how edtech experiences are designed and tested, with the help of a great bunch of classmates, instructors and ex-colleagues (who I debrief with first thing after class!). I’m starting this series of weekly design journal- where I hope to list down my assumptions, thoughts and post testing reflections.]
Designing experiences, to teach how to design experiences- sounds less complicated than it is.
But it doesn’t have to be that way!
We’ll be testing a game we built next week. With real human kindergarteners!
We reviewed a ‘designing toolkit for kids’ and tested a live simulation (that’s what they call ‘games’ in this class!) today- developed by MIT Media Lab- where we were trying to prevent a viral epidemic. The game was very self explanatory and simple- superbly interactive. It was designed to understand how game designing works, had multiple rounds, allowed people to form their own groups, change strategies, lobby to test their strategies and a ton of customizable features. It was fun!
But.
We could not finish playing it because of the biggest devil of the tech world- ‘Glitches!’
Here’s what I found on my notebook as a design reminder for learning games (for adults):
· The game made us aware about bugs. How to troubleshoot and test, for a live audience, and a large number of audience.
· I feel we should have design and testing contingency plans. And keep these plans separate! Something similar to google chrome’s mini dinosaur game that we play everytime we get offline. You know you will need time to fix bugs. What do your users experience during those times? You fear this design a might be too risky, how can you infuse a way for design b?
· It should help to have a complete offline troubleshooting plan- for days when nothing works for us and that bug won’t be fixed (today was one of those days). In that case how would we communicate similar lessons through offline methods. Pro Tip: Make the offline backup as fun as possible to compensate. Offline doesn’t have to be less fun!
· Focus on creating meaningful human interactions. Interesting how we can make people physically move- and interact with other people in a physical space, with these simple games- which means EdTech doesn’t have to mean less human interaction. Period.
· Keep it simple. (Write it down somewhere so you can constantly see it during brainstorming. Because YOU WILL FORGET IT!)
· Create very specific and narrow constraint in your game. It helps in coordination and improves experience for the user.
· Facilitation is crucial. Figure out how you want to share instructions. Keep them in one place. Make sure to bring everyone on the same page.
· Design the game in phases. So that the Facilitator can control on the go. The designers of the game we played kept flexibility for us to change parameters of the game- which meant 10 games played by 10 different groups may have 10 different outcomes- giving control to your user is massively important. This is where the game started getting interesting for us old folks!
Biggest takeaway (about designing for kids) for the day- from the toolkit we reviewed?
“Give kids an idea of how their day will go. Treat them like experts. Ask a silly question. Show them how kids’ feedback made products better. Mirror the kid’s energy level. ”