Teenage gamer struggles to maintain good physical health due to long gaming sessions
James recently discovered a new gaming arena at his university. He started gaming there as a leisure activity, however now he spends significant amount of hours sitting in front of the gaming PC. Although, he still enjoys playing games, it has now started impacting his health. With increasing back and neck pain, James posture seems to worsening day by day.
How might we help gamers improve their physical well-being and overcome video game addiction?
The problem is that players are spending more time gaming thus resulting in their poor physical health. This can mainly be due to a lack of awareness and motivation for the actions that are required to be taken.
FitGamer: A smart productivity app that recommends outdoor events and health suggestions based on your gaming activity.
The goal of this project was to provide gamers with a new way to express their gaming interests that don't involve sitting in front of screens for hours on end. Our application achieved this goal by providing gamers personalized event recommendations, a roadmap to track their improving health and tips for their better physical health.
Before calling out the design process, research findings and visual design following are the key features of FitGamer:
Ohh, But how did I reach here?
During these 6 weeks, my team and I followed the Double Diamond design process and further divided our research and design process into three primary categories:
3-4% of gamers worldwide were addicted to video games, meaning as many as 60 million people or more suffering.
From analyzing the different gaming genres, the research data indicated that Social Simulation games are considered to be the most addictive, with 5.08% of reviews containing the word ‘addictive’. The data indicated that 25-34-year-olds were the most susceptible, as compared to 16-24-year-olds age group. This highlights the fact that, despite what society may assume, both younger people and older people were susceptible to becoming addicted to gaming.
The interviews and field observations revealed 3 key pain points that gamers faced,
After the gaming session, gamers felt physically fatigued but they continued playing since it was hard for them to end the game specially during multiplayer games.
Excessive gaming often leads to losing interest in other activities such as sports, exercise, hobbies, relationships and even essentials like eating and sleeping
Gamers often get indulge in long gaming sessions and lose track of time they have spent on playing games. With games becoming more immersive, this problems seems to be growing.
After research, interview & observations we needed to better empathize with our main user groups and prioritize goals according to their needs.
Using the formative research, our team identified that gamers playing for long sessions were the target users of our application. We then defined our user goals & pain points.
At this point, we had addressed user pain points but how could I translate these pain points into design opportunities to create an end to end user experience?
We as a team took use of affinity maps and performed collaborative brainstorming to narrow down the top 3 ideas from 35 design suggestions to define the MVP.
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Based on the insights gained from the affinity mapping and brainstorming, our team defined the Information architecture for FitGamer
Finally, we converted these design opportunities above into 3 core features of our MVP by taking help of brainstorming & affinity mapping methods. Following which, I led my team to prototype the final concept into app designs delivering the below key features:
Suggest activities related to gaming interests that replaces games
Gamers love exploring gaming related activities, so what if I could suggest them those activities?
Gamers can find just as much satisfaction in exploring the world around them. There are tons of outdoor activities that are perfect for gamers—and we rounded up the best ones! FitGamer suggests those outdoor fun events based on your gaming activity.
Match gamers with buddy who they can tag along for an event
Pairing the gamers with a buddy who knows exactly what it's like to be addicted to gaming
These buddies are previous gaming addicts who understand how difficult it is to go outside and have fun. Gamers can set preferences for buddies and even chat before going to an event.
Provide a medium to track goals and tips to improve physical health
Gamers love achievements, what if I could help them complete health goals in form of achievements?
FitGamer helps to keep track of your progress and personalize your experience based on your goals, so you're always working towards your physical well being. The app connects with you every day and show you how many achievements you've earned by living a healthy lifestyle and provide general health tips for you.
I led my team in conducting Heuristic Evaluation, where we found 3 prevalent usability issues. Along with that, we conducted think aloud sessions with 4 potential users as a part of user testing.
The user faced control and freedom issues due to the lack of a back or close button to go back to the previous section. The think-aloud session made us aware that the user found it difficult to update details on the profile section. People also missed the feature of randomly selecting a buddy due to lack of proper naming conventions. The user was also confused about the journey page on how to unlock the achievement
"Extremely happy with the outcome of your research and ideation and how you landed upon your design solution"
This was the first project in my HCI degree but more importantly I had the opportunity to work on problems related to gaming industry which was exciting since I am a gamer myself and these were my key learnings:
Take small steps, because big changes can not be brought overnight, especially not just by an application alone. Accordingly, develop more strategically meaningful and realistically applicable tools that steer in the intended direction.
I thought too digitally and approached the product with too concrete ideas about the result, thus failing to correctly take into account some needs and challenges of the target group and thus unfavorably defined the minimum viable product.
I learned how to effectively convey my rationale and justify the design during the discussions back-and-forth, and I also realized that efficient and open internal communications would motivate the teammates and drive the entire project going towards a better direction.
I put too much dependency that technology can solve them. it makes us lose focus on what’s actually important.
3-4% of gamers worldwide were addicted to video games, meaning as many as 60 million people or more suffering.
From analyzing the different gaming genres, the research data indicated that Social Simulation games are considered to be the most addictive, with 5.08% of reviews containing the word ‘addictive’. The data indicated that 25-34-year-olds were the most susceptible, as compared to 16-24-year-olds age group. This highlights the fact that, despite what society may assume, both younger people and older people were susceptible to becoming addicted to gaming.
3-4% of gamers worldwide were addicted to video games, meaning as many as 60 million people or more suffering.
From analyzing the different gaming genres, the research data indicated that Social Simulation games are considered to be the most addictive, with 5.08% of reviews containing the word ‘addictive’. The data indicated that 25-34-year-olds were the most susceptible, as compared to 16-24-year-olds age group. This highlights the fact that, despite what society may assume, both younger people and older people were susceptible to becoming addicted to gaming.
At this point, we had addressed user pain points but needed to define the MVP
We as a team took use of affinity maps and performed collaborative brainstorming to narrow down the top 3 ideas from 35 design suggestions to define the MVP.
Based on the insights gained from the affinity mapping and brainstorming, our team defined the Information architecture for FitGamer
Finally, after iterating on the feedback we received from user testing, I led my team to prototype the final concept into app designs. And in our final solution, we made sure to address a wide spectrum of autistic users and meet their public transit needs.
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