Challenges Study, Magic Sort

This week I prepared the Looking Glass versions that would be used in the challenges study. The participants will be divided into two groups. One group will have access only to challenges, while the other group will have access only to templates and custom scene set-up. I also made some tweaks to ensure that participants will otherwise have a similar experience when using Looking Glass. For example, users in the custom set-up condition start Looking Glass with the “choose a template” menu, which is very similar to the “choose a challenge” menu in the challenges version. (Example here: http://i1278.photobucket.com/albums/y510/lookingglasswustl/control.png)

Magic sort is currently merged into master and being tried on the test website.  Mary and I are making some final tweaks to make sure we have something worthwhile to users while still maintaining a speedy algorithm.

While user testing at the Science Center this past weekend, I took some problem challenges that defied the list of “rules” I made for ideal challenge design last week, and modified them to follow those guidelines. The Ice Skating challenge, which was noticably a negative experience overall for test users, was modified so that the bunny’s starting position was the ice (users struggled with simply getting the bunny to the ice, let alone try to do ice skating tricks), and more characters were added to bring in the ability to make a “social” scene. The characters were the baby yeti and the wolf, and I positioned the wolf to be slightly separate from the bunny and the yeti.

Three participants chose this modified challenge and succeeded in making complete stories without virtually any help from me, and were engaged during the entire time slot. The interesting thing was that story plots in the original Ice Skating challenge revolved around, well, ice skating, but the story plots for the new Ice Skating challenge centered around the relationships between the characters. Each story made the wolf a focal character; either the wolf was being left out of playing on the ice and had his feelings hurt, or he was there to be a bully. This could be either because the wolf was a “bigBadWolf”, which has a definite negative conotation, or because I isolated him in the scene. On Raft Rescue during previous user tests, though, the wolf was positioned next to the CheshireCat, and was almost never a negative character. Either way, adding characters and positioning them took a faulty challenge and made it compelling and easier to manipulate.