Reflection
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Uncover the truth about our experience of designing during a time of pandemic.
Reflection
The creative and technical realisation of Through Other Eyes, was a complex, challenging and ultimately rewarding experience for the whole team. Over the course of the project, we overcame many unprecedented challenges that arose due to COVID-19 and worked together to design and develop an exceptional final product. Taking a unique and ambitious approach to tackling the core design challenge was an early and unanimous decision that we made with the understanding that if successful, we would be able to deliver a creative solution that would not only exceed all expectations but fundamentally address the issue of awareness of occupational violence against front line staff that was at the core of the design brief.
Working in unprecedented conditions on Through Other Eyes, was a challenge in and of itself. Fundamentally, the team had to radically adjust into a new, flexible workflow which would ensure that we could ideate in a collaborative way without needing to be face-to-face, complete all of the research and development in a timely fashion, and ultimately deliver the final prototype for our game on schedule. Online collaboration and software such as Miro, Discord and Microsoft Teams were absolutely critical to the delivery and success of this project due to the obstacles and challenges that arose due to COVID-19.
At its core, the research and development process that lead to the conceptualization of Through Other Eyes, enabled the team to gain valuable insights into the core issue of occupational violence and its many forms as well as valuable insights into the economic and societal impact that COVID-19 has had on both the general populace and those who have risked their lives working as front-line staff during the pandemic. Furthermore, the key outcomes of this project have included gaining the necessary experience required to work in a functional and collaborative way in a team while in undesirable conditions and more crucially, a fully realized interactive narrative adventure game that we believe can have a real impact on the level of awareness that the general public has of occupational violence against front-line staff.
Methods
Creating a viable, appropriate and effective solution to the design challenge at hand involved learning and applying numerous ux research and development methods which were critical to the conceptualization of Through Other Eyes. The team allocated a generous amount of research and development time to learning how to successfully utilize research methods such as interviews and surveys as well as learning to successfully use tools such as journey and empathy maps to better understand our target audience and subsequently use the insights gained to design a solution that would effectively target and address the central issue at hand.
Platforms
As the COVID-19 pandemic forced the team to radically adjust to working from home, making use of collaborative digital tools such as Miro in the ideation stage of our project, was crucial in ensuring that the team could effectively function and design a solution that would solve the core challenge set out in the design brief. At its core, Through Other Eyes was designed using software in the Adobe Creative Suite, including XD for prototyping as well as Illustrator which was extensively used to design the visuals found in the final version of the game. Additionally, video conferencing software was critical to the testing phase of our project as it allowed the team to continue testing our low, mid and high fidelity prototypes whilst the team was under lockdown, throughout the duration of the project.
Challenges
1. COVID-19
The greatest challenge the team faced during the conceptualization, design and development of Through Other Eyes was the COVID-19 global pandemic. The effects of the national lockdowns, quarantines as well as the economic and travel restrictions imposed by governments both foreign and domestic were deeply impactful on the project as the team was required to radically adjust to working remotely and developing a complex project in a collaborative fashion whilst not being able to do so in a conventional face-to-face environment. Furthermore, COVID-19 related restrictions had a significant impact on the development process as the ability of the team to effectively engage in observational and immersive research, conduct interviews and proactively test our solution was severely limited due to government restrictions and guidelines. Overall, while the impact of the pandemic on the project was substantial and prolonged, we believe that critically, we were able to design and deliver an appropriate and unique response to the design challenge.
2. Testing in Lockdown
Conducting proactive user testing whilst the team was living under lockdown across multiple countries proved to be one of the biggest challenges that we faced during the development of Through Other Eyes. Limited access to potential testers and the constantly evolving guidelines and government regulations regarding contact with others meant that conventional user testing would be effectively impossible due to COVID-19. To overcome this substantial obstacle, we chose to conduct our user testing with people that were a part of our target audience and accessible to us during the pandemic. This primarily included our families and friends with whom we were able to use both moderated and remote testing to gain the necessary insights and feedback to further refine and develop our project.
3. Illustrations
The extraordinary quantity of illustration work that was required to bring Through Other Eyes to life was one the biggest challenges we faced during the design and development process. Initially, the team sincerely believed that it would impossible to design all of the screens that we needed to create. Fortunately, we were able to streamline the interface design process, create a style guide and design series of characters, elements and backgrounds for the game. This way, we are able to combine different characters, backgrounds and conversation boxes to generate hundreds of screens. Although we spent an enormous amount of time, designing all of the assets, once they were finished, the game screen design process became quite simple and less time consuming than previously thought.
4. Narrative Scripting
Writing the script for Through Other Eyes' multi-character narrative story was a time-consuming and challenging endeavor which involved transforming the insights we gained into occupational violence and our target audience from the research and development stages of the project into a complex and engaging narrative story complete with a multitude of different story line options and endings. Critically, it was this balance of informative context and entertaining narrative which was most difficult to translate into a script that could effectively meet and exceed the requirements of the design challenge.
Team Synergy
Joseph Heifetz
Project Manager, Lead Designer
Christian Karakiklas
Research, UX Designer
Ruolin Jia
Research, UI Designer
Kevin Dinh
Research, User Testing
Jiajun Tan
Research, User Testing
Zeyu Chen
Research