Seminar: Walk While Work - UX-Driven Development of Player Type-Centric Motion Games

Your task will be to come up with a gamified solution to motivate specific user groups (based on their player type) to use a treadmill during office work. To this end, you will conduct several design steps before starting the implementation. As you usually have limited resources in practice (e.g., limited time, limited access to testing opportunities, limited access to participants), you will learn and use techniques that are also used in an industry context today. We will also have a mobile test setup in which the game can be tested.

This is a group project. At the beginning you will be randomly matched to three other students, and you will be randomly assigned a player type for which you should develop the solution for.

We meet on Fridays, 10-12 and these weekly meetings are used to provide you with necessary information for being able to successfully generate the hand-ins. Besides of the hand-ins you also need to present what you did to the other students. Important: Until Christmas, you will have weekly tasks to do (see below for details), please keep this in mind.

If you want to attend the seminar, please register here. Please note: You need to have passed the core lecture "Human Computer Interaction" to attend this seminar. 

Meeting Overview

Pleae note: The deadlines for the central seminar system have been changed (assignment date has been shifted), so that we cannot do the Kickoff at 22.10. Thus all dates were shifted one week - the new schedule looks like this:

29.10.2021 – Kick-off + “first lecture”: Teams-Link
05.11.2021, 12.11.2021, 19.11.2021, 26.11.2021 – Meetings in lecture style
03.12.2021 – Group presentations Part I (Slides)
10.12.2021 – Meeting in lecture style
17.12.2021 – tbd (maybe nothing)
07.01.2022 – tbd (maybe nothing)
14.01.2022 – Group presentations Part II (Slides)
11.02.2022 – Group presentations Part III (Showcase game in our test lab)
01.04.2022 – Final presentation (Slides + Video) - in the lecture free period: 10am-14pm

The Kick-off and the following meetings will be done virtually. We will use MS Teams for this. The link will be provided in the first lecture week via CMS.
We assign advisors to every group. They can decide on a per group basis, whether additional physical presence meetings will be conducted.

Passing the seminar & grading

This seminar is split into three mandatory parts (part I-III) and an optional part in the lecture free period (part IV) [Please note: there might be a chance that we cannot offer part IV in general. It depends on the Corona situation in February/March]. The latter part might provide you with a bonus to the final grade. Every part is graded separately, see below what needs to be done per part. For the final grade we calculate the average of these three grades and will round them to the better grade. After this, we apply the potential bonus from the optional part IV.

To pass the seminar, you need to be present on all dates, need to attend every experiment that is conducted during the optional part IV (we advise every group to stick with a one hour experiment, so this will cost you between 0-3 hours in the lecture free period, depending on how many groups are interested in doing part IV) and pass part I, II and III (i.e., receive at least a 4.0 in each part).

Organization

Thomas Immich (Centigrade)
Theres Scheucher (Centigrade)
Miriam Julius (Centigrade)

Dr. Pascal Lessel
Maximilian Altmeyer
Marc Schubhan

For organizational matters contact Pascal Lessel (CC: Max and Marc). For questions regarding LeanScope contact Theres Scheucher (CC: Thomas and Miriam).

 

Deadline & hand-in details [will be moved to the CMS as soon as the CS seminar assignment has been done]:

We will release detailed information (i.e., grading-relevant information) as soon as a part starts. Nonetheless, you can get an overview on the workload by considering this overview (and the deadlines).

Part I: Research and Requirements Modelling

• Player type assessment of peers: Each team member gives a standard questionnaire to ten friends to find out their player types. With this, you will identify suitable participants for the following tasks. 
  Hand-in (05.11.2021): Documentation of the aggregated scores per participant

• Conducting 3 interviews with matching peers [matching = the dominant player type of the participant is the one that was assigned to your group]: We provide you with a script of questions. But as this is a semi-structured interview, you should ask additional questions, where reasonable. With this you will get insights on how someone having the player type for which you design for acts in the context.
  Hand-in (12.11.2021): The final interview script that you have used, a simple transcript of every interview (both, what was asked by you + response of participant) + Marking of themes in the transcripts + documentation of results that you derived
  
  
• Literature review: Find out what is already known about the assigned player type from a scientific perspective by considering related work (at least 5 papers). You should also get a clear idea of which game elements/game mechanics/features are relevant for the player type and which should not be used for it. 
  Hand-in (12.11.2021): Documentation of results
  
  
• Creation of a persona and a usage scenario:  Based on the findings of your scientific research as well as a given business model canvas, you are requested to model a representative, yet fictive target user - a so-called persona - by filling a respective sheet. The persona sheet is supposed to contain detailed information about the fictive target users including motivational, frustration aspects, demographic information as well as, of course, its player type profile. After you have modelled the persona, you will go forward in LeanScope to model a usage scenario in which your persona acts as a protagonist. Think of a scenario as a narrative or short story that describes, step by step, an everyday situation of your persona, focusing on the context of walking or other physical movement. In these steps, just like with many of the following steps, you will be supported by LeanScope, an intuitive user requirements tool that you will get free Pro access for. LeanScope Pro will also provide you with explanatory educational videos that will help you succeed with user-centered methodologies.
  Hand-in (19.11.2021): These artefacts should be provided in LeanScope

• Creation of user booklets: Once you have written down your scenario, you can go through it step by step and derive a couple of so-called “user needs” from the activities and thoughts of your persona in that certain situation. To minimize your workload and strive towards “lean” thinking, you are requested to skim your user needs and sort out all of those that might not be relevant in the context of your business model canvas, so that you will finally end up with only three of them. Translate your three topmost user needs into user stories and wrap them into so-called user booklets, little envelopes that allow you to gather and collect important information in a user need centric way. You can then go ahead to sort in your scientific findings into the three user booklets at hand. Again, LeanScope will provide you with all necessary tools as well as educational videos in case you are stuck somewhere.
  Hand-in (26.11.2021): These artefacts should be provided in LeanScope
  
  
• 03.12: 12 Minute presentation of Part I (Slides) + 10 minutes discussion

Part II: Ideation and Concept Modelling

• Conducting 3 interviews with the same peers again: The goal is to prioritize the found user needs and understand why they have given this priority. Based on this, the three most relevant user needs should be transformed into a user story and an MVP statement.
  Hand-in (10.12.2021): These artefacts should be provided in LeanScope

• Ideation: Take the three user needs of your former activities to derive your core game idea. For this we require several artefacts from you: Infinite Canvas per user need, creation of a story board (3 frames/story) to convey the concept, define a user journey, give an analogy to an existing game, define three sprints (i.e., what will be the criteria to say that a sprint was successful).
  Hand-in (17.12.2021): These artefacts should be provided in LeanScope
  
  
• Modelling of Entities:  In order to plan your software development steps properly, you are requested to skim through your solution ideas and derive all the informational building blocks that your persona is supposed to know about during his/her journey. You can create so-called entities using LeanScope and describe their nature purpose as well as their hierarchical relationships. LeanScope will automatically create an Entity Map for you, so that you have an overview of your core game information architecture.
  Hand-in (07.01.2022): These artefacts should be provided in LeanScope
  
  
• 14.01.2022: 12 Minute presentation of Part II (Slides) + 10 minutes discussion

 

Part III: Implementation

• Sprints:There will be 3 two-week sprints. For each, you have defined your own acceptance criteria that you would like to reach during the ideation phase (see above). These are for your own planning purposes and will not be graded, but they will be used to check on your progress bi-weekly.

• ECS Application:Based on Part II (Concept and Modelling) you will implement an ECS-based prototype that works with the hardware in our test lab. You need to ensure that you meet your sprint deadlines.
  Hand-in (11.02.2022): Source code + Setup Manual - This also marks the end of the third sprint.
  
  
• 11.02.2021: Presentation of game directly in the test lab [we will see about the exact format in January].
  
  
  
• 31.03.2022: Hand-in of a video “marketing-pitch” – 5 min max. - Which persona did you create, provide key facts from the requirements engineering, describe what you have done and show your game. Basically describe “why-how-what”     
  
  
• 01.04.202: Final presentation: 25 minutes presentation of Part I-III (Slides) + 10 minutes if Part IV has been done (Slides) + 15 minutes discussion.
  [this is in the lecture free period, which is why this slot will be 10-14pm]
  
  

Part IV (optional): Evaluation

You can receive a 0.3, 0.7 or 1.0 bonus to your final grade. For this, you need to conduct a user study in the lecture free period, testing your game. We will provide more information in January, when the Corona situation is more graspable then. Please note, that depending on the situation, we will not offer this optional part at all.