Challenges study

This weekend, I will be launching back into studying what makes a good challenge.

Challenges in Looking Glass are designed to inspire story creation. They try to provide a compelling context and set-up to hopefully launch the user straight into coding his or her story without having to struggle over an original plotline and scene. However, challenges are new, and without a strong user base yet, we do not yet know whether or not they are actually motivating.

I plan to continue looking first at what makes a challenge inspiring. I have been running small user studies at the St Louis Science Center, and will again this weekend, to determine essentially what the formula is for the makings of a compelling challenge. Which challenges are the most popular, and why? Do users come up with story ideas quickly based on the chosen challenge, or do they flounder on what story to create? Are users generally satisfied with the story they chose to implement in that challenge? Did they feel railroaded into picking the story they implemented, based on the scene set-up or prompt? If so, is that OK? And so on.

Once we feel that we have a general grasp on what makes a challenge generally inspiring and popular, I then hope to start studying what effects challenges have on the user experience. For example, do users spend more time programming on challenge-generated projects than they do on personal projects where they need to additionally focus on story generation and scene set-up? Are users more confident in the stories they pick when they chose them via a challenge? And, perhaps later, what are the effects of other challenge entries on the user's choice in what they create?