Digitizing a Physical Game
ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
Ani Nguyen Le
Jacqueline Guo
SKILLS
Visual Design
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Game Design
TIMELINE
5 Weeks
TOOLS
Figma
Protopie
OUR INITIAL PLAN
Create a shared camera experience
We started out trying to design a playful shared camera experience and spent a week diverging, exploring up to 20 different ideas:
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Create a 10x better experience by digitizing a popular icebreaker
Inspired by our respective positive experiences with icebreaker bingos, we arrived at creating a photo bingo app that is a 10x better experience for both event organizers and players compared to the current pen and paper format.
CHALLENGE
Traditional icebreaker bingo is a two sided market with distinct challenges
Organizers
Play a highly active role, having to prepare questions and materials in advance, figure out the logistics of distribution, and verify interactions to determine victors.
Players
Can quickly become bored with one dimensional gameplay experience, paper tearing, and the lack of enduring impact following the activity
SOLUTION
Digitized process for efficient set up, intuitive gameplay, and to capture moments
With our app, organizers can set up a game in a manner of minutes and have all players play it with their mobile devices with minimal guidance along with captured moments of the event available post event.
Creation flow
Primary game mechanic
Post game experience
PRINCIPLES
Design principles for a 10x experience
Approachable
A solution requiring minimal guidance for organizers and players.
Connective
Preserving the initial goal of the icebreaker: bring people together.
Playful
An experience that players would enjoy and prefer.
DEEP DIVE
Designing primary mechanic: Board size
In this deep dive, we will cover the consumption flow and how we arrived at our bingo interface and primary mechanic. The first question we had to answer was: How big should our board be?
Bingo interface and viewing prompts
Having decided on board size, we approached the challenge of figuring out our primary mechanic and viewing prompts by splitting up and covering multiple angles – visuals, interaction, motion – simultaneously.
Some of our explorations for how users could potentially view prompts while bearing in mind the potential for creating playful, potentially fidget inducing interactions.
INSIGHT
Leaning into motion to create playfulness
We realized that the most effective way to achieve our desired level of playfulness was to strive for a simple visual design that allowed for us to be expressive through motion and interaction. This allowed us to narrow down to two main designs:
DEEP DIVE CONTINUED
User testing to select the preferred interface
Feedback from user testing, designers, and our principles led us to choose the fluid interface because of its minimal state changes and the opportunities we saw in creating a playful experience.
END OF FREE TRIAL
Curious to hear more?
If you're curious about the nitty gritty of our process, don't hesitate to reach out to hw3617@nyu.edu and I'd be happy to bring you through our thinking on this and other deep dives. Thanks for following along!