Project Challenge:

To create a non-screen centric mobile experience for tweens and their families that helps garner a greater appreciation for the outdoors.

Project User:

This experience targeted tweens with an engaging augmented reality experience, offering a fantasy-driven solution for parents who want to cultivate an appreciation for the outdoors and outdoor activity.

Project Role:

I was User Experience designer and Game Design Consultant on this project. This primarily involved helping turn the project owner’s vision into a functional prototype that would lay the groundwork for further development of the full product which is now entering into early production. I provided all user flow, wireframes and mock-ups during this process, which were handed off directly to production in Unity.

The Challenge:

Our design challenge was to take initial steps in creating the first episode in a planned franchise: Whisper Walks. Entitled Wildermage, this prototype episode was to be an AR-enhanced, location-based adventure game for use on Android or iOS smart mobile devices.

Using illustration, animation, and visual effects to bring nature to life through the smartphone, the game needed to encourage kids and families to get outside by digitally “gamifying” nature, transforming a healthy walk outside into an immersive, magical experience.

Discovery:

The project lead for this initiative was former Pixar creative Jericca Cleland, known for her work in such films as A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2 and Finding Nemo. She brought the vision to this project and lead its discovery and we established the following design goals:

• We wanted to create an experience where a hiking trail could be brought to life and reveal secrets and adventures through the power of augmented reality. This would necessitate however the need to strategically keep the screen ‘out of the way’, in order to not make a hike a screen dominant experience. We really wanted to just ‘augment’ the hike and not consume a player’s attention with a screen. This meant we needed to be highly mindful of when and how often we called attention to the screen…

• A screen retrieval strategy - we realized this needed to be a stow-and-go experience, not something where the player would keep the app open in their hand constantly monitoring in-game status. So we would need to come up with some loose experiential scheduling based on length of hike and ensure notifications were an expected part of the Wildermage experience.

• Urban possibilities - while we were designing this experience to accentuate the hiking trail for tweens and families, we also wanted to make sure that urban families could avail themselves of a magical experience in a park or urban trail. We would need to account for these scenarios, especially if we wanted the storytelling of the experience to remain accessible even closer to home.

Proposed Solution:

To address the issues raised during discovery, we would really want to create a proof of concept that we could get into testing as soon as possible so we could test some assumptions. As such we created a design that used timed experience windows that would pepper AR moments throughout. During this window, we would use the metaphor of a ‘summoning stone’ that lived on the device that would vibrate and notify the user when preternatural events were occuring and it was time to take out the device and inspect one’s surroundings.

The device itself was fictionally situated as ‘lens’ through which the player could see things in natures that others could not - mechanically setting the stage for our AR moments where players would be greeted by fairies opening portals to an unseen part of our world.

Testing:

In an attempt to improve on our game design and overall user experience, we facilitated a series of focus group feedback events in the winter of 2021 and early 2022.

The intention for each of these events was to test early assumptions around our experience model and identify key features and game experience potential that caught the attention of players, in order to strengthen the game’s content and determine what to include, develop, or cut from our design process going into production.

Our feedback was gathered in three focus group testing periods that exposed the product to a variety of audiences and geographical markets:

• An event hosted in Sechelt, Canada with a school class of 11-14 year olds and accompanying adults.

• A series of smaller tests with several family groups held in Cape Town, South Africa.

• An event hosting a group of professional experience designers in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Throughout the testing we sought to capture participant insights regarding:

• Overall impression

• Comprehension of world and experience

• Appeal, engagement, and playability

The results, in short, were promising:

• 75% of participants expressed a wish to continue keep playing the game.

• 80% found the interface intuitive and easy-to-use, but wanted less text during mission game play.

• 95% of participants were interested in the story and world and expressed a wish to know more.

While our tests did provide a lot of profound value, It also became clear that the engagement was much greater when the experience was facilitated. While this offered great insight into our design, it became apparent that many users reached several hurdles as they were trying to progress. This is a function of it being a limiited prototype meant to test out the technology and approach. However, it proved highly overall to be successful as a proof of concept and as a platform for building a compelling product and generally points to a need for both less explanation and more gamified context as well as intuitive and more varied gameplay.

Next Steps:

This project is now taking the results of our early research and iterating on the experience model and creative. There’s a long road ahead for this game, but as things move forward with this initiative, we’ll be broadening the scope of the project from a technological perspective as well user-centered one.