Parcel Rush
UX Design ︲ UI Design ︲ UX Research
Game
2020
About Parcel Rush:
Parcel rush is a 2D top down game. Players have to guide an increasing number of parcels to their containers via changing the direction of conveyor belts. There is a total of 9 levels in this game, and difficulty increases with each level. During the whole gameplay, players need to be focused so that they can lead different parcels to their correct containers in turn. They need to place a minimum number of parcels in their correct containers so that they can move on to the next level.
The Challenge:
The high-level goals were to:
- Create a digital experience for a single user using Unity 2D or Unity 3D.
- Be a digital only experience.
- Provide an engaging, exciting and interesting user experience.
- Be useable with only a keyboard, mouse (or trackpad), speakers and microphone.
My Role:
I led the Design Team which was split between UI and Art. However, I was particularly focused on the UI and UX design but often would join the Art team which was involved in the creation of the game’s assets such as icons and sprites.
Mains Tasks:
- Customers Insights & Ideation
- Building the Project Vision
- Sketches
- User Scenarios
- Wireframing
- Interactive Prototype
- Developing the User Interface
Design Toolkit:
Design Process:
We wanted our game to have a more player-centric development process and culture by embodying the voice of the players through our design. We developed a process as a way to craft better gameplay experiences for our players by using User Experience Design techniques. For the design team, using UX design methodology helped massively in answering questions that appeared throughout the design process. If we left these questions unanswered the game could move away from the intended purpose and experience.
The first step of our design process involved user interviews and desk research to understand how competitors and users behave. I believe it’s important to get this information early on in the process, before having an idea or prototyping.
After analysing the data, we received for the user interviews along with the desk research, I began to conceptualize the solution, focusing on sketches and wireframes to give me a way to iterate faster through ideas. From this, I went to the production mode, designing the interface considering design principles such as contrast, hierarchy and feedback and user interactions.
Once the interface was ready, I took feedback from both the Art and UI teams in order to understand if there were any gaps in my design that needed to be changed. Once I recived this feedback I then took feedback from the whole team in order to get a completely different perspective.
User Interviews:
User interviews are a core user experience method. That’s why I chose to approach 10 people to interview, taking into account the recommendation from Donald Norman’s article, “Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users,” noting that it is possible to learn about 80% of the errors, problems, and behaviour from the first 6 users.
That would bring enough data and inputs to generate concepts and hypothesis.
After conceptualization phase, however, I took the prototype out to test with other users in order to gather more feedbacks and validation. This was done with the Interactive Prototype we created rather late on in the design process.
Interviewed Audience:
The interview sample took into account men and women aged from 18 to 55, from all over the UK. Our interview pool was created in order to be diverse with people interviewed coming from a wide range of backgrounds all with different gaming habits and preferences.
Young people and those with internet access tend to have high rates of smartphone ownership, so I designed a survey targeted at this group. Our interview pool was created in order to be diverse with people interviewed coming from a wide range of backgrounds all with different gaming habits and preferences. We wanted asked participants about their thoughts, use and experience of brain-training apps.
Customer Insights:
There is currently a continued consumer demand for brain-training apps, despite the current uncertainty of their claims that tthey work which provides an opportunity for scientists, consumers and developers to work together to develop apps that offer proven benefits. Out of the 15 people interviewed 95% said that they would be interested and very interested in downloading a brain training app.
Over two-thirds of those surveyed said brain-training apps improved their thinking, memory, and attention, and more than half said they improved their mood. People who had high expectations for brain-training apps before using them still had these positive feelings after using them. This suggests that people may purchase and use brain-training apps because they have strong positive expectations of them.
Another conclusion from the survey was that the cost of the apps was a major factor in whether the user would download them and a primary barrier to their use. Some customers were concerned about the ambiguity of their 'brain-training' claims and believe that the risk of it not working is far too high given the high price. Despite often bold claims made by brain training apps in order to get as many users to download it, people want to know the actual evidence and effectiveness of these claims are and how it will help them.
Desk Research:
In addition, I tested the waters by studying our rivals in order to see what they do that makes them successful with the hope that this makes it easy for our app to be successful. In-depth analysis of their moves, inspirations, and marketing strategies assisted us in imitating their strategies, whereby our unique approach would be the factor that could give us a revolutionary advantage over our competitors.
Looking at the key players in the market its clear to see that CogniFit, Elevate, Lumosity and Happify have a dominate grip on the market and that each one focuses on ` specific area of the brain whether that would be memory, attention, language, executive function or visual.
Market Insights:
The increasing prevalence of dementia among the world's population has raised awareness of the importance of maintaining brain fitness, which has become a major factor driving market revenue growth for brain fitness games. This has also opened up a large opportunity for global investors to invest in the development of these games. However, one of the major factors preventing market growth is a lack of scientific research. There are several companies on the market that create brain training apps without conducting proper research or seeking expert advice, claiming to be effective for cognitive assessment.
As technology has advanced augmented reality has started to be used in classrooms to make learning more enjoyable for children, with astounding results. In this technologically advanced world, interactive AR games can help children learn concepts at their own pace. Augmented reality-based brain games can help children learn, pay attention, and process information more quickly. As a result, incorporating augmented reality into brain training apps will increase the market's potential for growth.
The global brain training apps market is divided into memory, attention, language, executive function, visual/spatial, and others. Visual skill games had the largest market share in 2022 and are made up of various games that aid in the improvement of visual ability and the training of visual-spatial skills. The games are designed for people of all ages. Train your Brain - Visuospatial Games is one such example. The game is available on the Android platform and includes a variety of games such as finding an objective number within a numerical range, repeating symmetrical patterns, puzzles and shapes, and others to help players improve their visual ability and train their visual-spatial skills.
Concept:
Parcel rush is a 2D top down game whereby players have to guide an increasing number of parcels to their containers via changing the direction of conveyor belts. There is a total of 9 levels in this game, and difficulty increases on each level.
Sketches:
Once the game pillars began to crystallize around our parcel movement idea the design team began the process of creating sketches, designs and prototypes specifically focused on gathering feedback on the specifics of the game i.e. design choices. This then helped inform us on the design choices and then assess them using research methods. By doing this it avoids having to double-back later in development and helps us in making the design decisions needed later on in the project.
We first created sketches as it helped us explore the idea and design concept before we got in too deep with the project. The sketches we created were fast, rough and dirty so we could focus less on design aesthetics and more on having rapid ideas. Two team members created the sketches so that they could be reviewed together in order to compare and consolidate the best ideas on the table. We then, as a group, had a meeting so we could all take part and discuss what works well and what doesn’t. Following this, we had a voting session to determine what designs we wanted to take forward.
User Scenarios:
We then decided to create a user scenario which conveyed the user's intention to do something, and the main steps along the way. Our user scenario became very helpful in finding out what motivates our persona to complete a certain task, which helped us discover and understand some of the pain points that might appear as well as identifying opportunities for improvement before getting far in the development process. By creating a scenario map, we were able to see what the key tasks are which we could start adding to our scenario with some context (i.e. what, where, and why). When we finished mapping out the key tasks, questions started to be gradually answered, creating a clearer picture of what the experience should be. The data from this process also helped us discover certain features that need to be added in the future, making the user journey a lot more seamless.
Wireframes:
After sketching, we created a wireframe as they gave us a great sense of where each element will be located on the screen. We first created wireframes so we could indicate the shape, size, and position that each element on the page needs to be. Wireframing allowed us to show the features of the game by providing clear communication to how these features will function, where they will live on a specific page and how useful they might be. Seeing the features without any creative decisions allows us to focus on the key aspects of the game. Furthermore, by creating a wireframe it allowed us to push usability to the forefront of our design as it forces us to look objectively at a website's ease of use, naming of links, navigation placement and feature placement and helped point out flaws in the game’s architecture.
Interactive Prototype:
From there we created an interactive prototype as it gave us a feel for the entire game, and therefore helped demonstrate the scenarios that players might experience when playing (ie. user stories). This allowed us to identify UX pitfalls and understand how we could combat them and improve the overall experience to make the game enjoyable.
When creating our interactive prototype, we figured out that there should be a tutorial level to help users through the first levels of the game. This would help players gain some familiarity about gameplay and how to pass levels. All questions we could address easily because of the creation of the prototype. The interactive prototype we created was also intended to help illustrate the functionality and narrative in a way that static screen specifications cannot for the developers. Therefore, this specifically aided in designer to developer hand-off which can usually be tricky with many things lost in translation. By having this asset, they could use the prototype as a way to answer functionality questions that might appear (e.g. what certain buttons are meant to do)? As well as provide developers with a holistic vision from the designers, ready to be implemented in code.
Final Game:
Colours:
The game's guidelines and theme led us to pick a playful and inviting colour palette, so we chose pink/purple and yellow to break the white and make the game youthful and vibrant (figure 9). Yellow was added to give the interface a warmer look and contrast with the vibrant pink background. For text, enough contrast was vital to ensure reading ease, thus reaching appropriate levels of accessibility. We used Adobe Kuler and the mock-ups to help see whether the palette would work and if the colours complement themselves or clash. Using this gave us the flexibility to change components as well as aiding team discussions and the development team to make sure it works.
Typography:
Since there would be a wide range of ages and technological abilities playing our game, we understood that the font and how easy everything is presented will make a huge difference in how popular and successful our game is. Therefore, we decided to use the default Unity font, Liberation Sans.
Validation:
Once the game was fully developed we felt that we should iterate the design before the deadline by considering usability tests, A/B tests, and other in-depth surveys with the user to improve the initial version. As a team we felt that by getting the functionality correct and making it easy for the user to use would be the first step towards the games success. Luckily for us the testing we did early in the design process was worth it as everyone who we tested on had high prise for how easy it was to understand and play the game.
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