Lumiere and Cogsworth would have been great designers. You know, if the Beast had not cast a spell on them and sentenced them to servitude until he found love. While they act as charming and adequate lighting and time-keeping equipment, their true talents lie in the design space. I am not saying that because they designed the Rococo style castle they were forced to call home or because they picked out the lovely China patterns or place settings or anything else they focused their energy on, but more of who they focused their energy on: their guest.
At the end of the day, good design is not deemed good design by a rigid set of standards. Good design is deemed good design by the people that interact with the designs. And, a lot of the time, good design is good design because the people that interact with it do not even notice it at all. Well-designed things make sense without having to tell people that they make sense.
In this round of everyone’s favorite grad school pressure cooker, Building Virtual Worlds, we were asked to build an experience for a naive guest that was both intuitive and freeing (aka good design) for the person who put on the Meta II AR headset. And, oh yeah, we weren’t allowed to tell the guests anything about the rules or controls or gestures involved in the game - we had to throw the guests into the deep end of our game and hope that everything made enough sense that they could find their ways out while we watched anxiously poolside.
Any group of five grad students would have greatly benefited from having Cogsworth (definitely a programmer-type) or Lumiere (definitely a lead sound designer with an art background) because most of us do not have much experience trying to balance building an experience that gives the guest a sense of freedom while also giving them tasks or things they should do that are obvious, but not overtly so.
This round became an exercise in utilizing indirect control. Most games and experiences are built to follow what’s called an interest curve - essentially a pretty standardized “timeline” of emotions of the guest engaging with the experience that generally trends positively throughout, but spikes into large peaks and valleys a long the way to keep the guest on his or her toes. The challenge, though, is that the more interaction a designer puts into an experience, the less control they have over the interest curve because the guest starts determining their own experience. Indirect control is the subtle art of design where the designer makes strategic decisions about constraints, goals, visuals, characters and more, that subconsciously prompt a guest to make certain decisions that the designer wants him or her to make. Mind cont… I mean, indirect control is super powerful and is employed by the people who design hallways in buildings, logos for restaurants, interfaces for social media and so much more. It’s all in the stuff that is so intuitive and so well-designed that we do not notice it.
So, that’s what we were facing at the outset of Round 2 (collectively known around the ETC as one of the toughest assignments in the program). Our motley crew spent hours and meals discussing the merits and possibilities of different concepts that we hoped a guest could interact with easily and freely while we could structure it in such a way that we could predict how they will act. Did I mention that? No? Oh yeah, we had to make a set of predictions about how our experience would play out with a legitimate naive guest and we would be graded based on how accurate we were. *deep breath*
After all of our hours spent brainstorming (emphasis on storming), we decided to move forward with a concept where the guest is deemed the “rain god” of a small island of villagers and the guest, entrusted with hands made of clouds the produce rain and thunder and lightning, is given the chance to interact with the island and its inhabitants for its betterment or detriment. If we thought choosing the concept was tough, developing game-play seemed impossible. We spent more and more meetings arguing the merits of structure and order without making concrete decisions because we did not know what the guest would enjoy or if they would be able to figure it out on their own.
So what did we do?
We asked them.
Throughout the two weeks, we invited several of our own friends, classmates and even strangers to playtest versions of our world so we could make decisions based on what they did and what they told us. After all, the guest is never wrong. We would observe how they interacted with different game modes and characters, how they triumphed and struggled, and how their mood changed throughout the experience (You were probably wondering when the Randy Pausch reference would come up, here it is. Professor Pausch emphasized observing what people do more than what they say - in projects and dating, funnily enough - so we tried to pay homage by doing both). We also interviewed them afterwards to try and better grasp what was going through their heads as they encountered different scenes. Playtesting was incredibly useful to our creative process. While we had hit road-blocks in discussions about lay-outs and features, our guests pin-pointed exactly where there were holes and what could possible fill them. They helped us solve our island size problem with a “lazy Susan” rotation device made of cardboard and they helped us determine how the volcano should serve as the finale of the experience. They weren’t wrong and we trusted that.
At times, our guests apologized for pointing out flaws and for being what they thought either “too naive” or “too mean”; however, each type of playtester and type of feedback was uniquely useful and helped add more layers to our design that helped cover things we missed before. People see the world in different ways and that seemed only to be magnified when it was a fake world in augmented reality. This idea of perspective really took hold this round and will stick with me as I can reminisce about a friend from undergrad spinning our island to battle pirates and a friend I’ve known since I was born trying to put on an AR headset for the first time. These moments give design and experiences true character because they are being made for people, not just for its own sake.
When handles fit just the right way or when there’s a light switch right where you expect one, part of you thinks that that product or experience was made just for you. There’s a more personal and intentional connection there and that’s the core of good design. And that’s what we should be striving for, right? Round 1 taught me to ask questions, Round 2 taught me to ask the right questions to the right people. And if you don’t believe me, let me know. I love when people tell me I’m wrong because then I get the chance to fix it and be right. So go ahead and tell me, be my guest.