FindAMoo

My team was assigned to work on creating an orientation app for new UC Davis students to use while they’re attending the week of orientation and learning to navigate the school. The app was meant to serve as a complement to orientation activities and be a resource for finding events and school information.

It offered 3 main features:
• A schedule for orientation events
• A campus map
• Informational pages on school and academic resources

Research

We asked current students through interviews and a Google Form survey about orientation to learn more about their past experiences. Orientation lengths and structures varied depending on the year they each entered UC Davis, due to COVID-related changes. Regardless of the differences, however, most reported feeling that they didn’t learn enough about the UC Davis community. Our findings revealed that what was covered during orientation was not enough for new students to learn about the school, leading us to seek ways to connect people to information.

Using our findings from research and with app requirements in mind, we mapped out a user's end-to-end experience with the orientation app. This was a way for us to visualize a user's path and see how our product could help a new student feel more confident and prepared to start school after attending orientation.

Following initial research into orientation experiences, our team decided to pivot to a new idea. Discussions about the challenges of approving a student-made app as an official school resource led us to reconsider our efforts of creating the orientation app.

Looking for new ideas, we participated in a round of crazy 8’s as a group. We wanted to address our main takeaway from orientation interviews, and centered our brainstorming around the issue of students not feeling informed enough about the UC Davis campus and community through orientation.

Our group decided after shareout to move forward with the concept of a mobile cow scavenger hunt game for UC Davis students. A daily game centered around the campus would increase student engagement and encourage exploration, and we believed this would be appealing not just to new students learning about campus, but also to older students who want to participate in a campus activity. We additionally chose to center the game around collecting cows, as cows are commonly seen as a mascot of the school and this would give our game a UC Davis-centered identity.

After developing the idea of a cow scavenger hunt game, I worked with the other designers to learn more about people’s experiences with games.

We collected responses on a survey asking students about their preferred gameplay and what features they found most enjoyable. Many were drawn to the social aspect of games, and liked being able to progress levels and earn achievements.

Our research also involved looking into games such as Wordle and Pokemon Go for their daily play and location-based aspect, respectively. We looked to consider which features made the games engaging. Wordle’s streaks encourage users to play every day, while Pokemon Go’s scavenger hunt of Pokemon not only encourages physical activity but also brings people together to explore their community.

Synthesis from our research indicated that people are drawn to social games with some form of game progression.

We participated in another round of Crazy 8’s as a team to ideate on potential core features of the app, drawing upon what we learned about game experiences. At this point, we were several weeks into our project term and wanted to rapidly brainstorm ideas to begin design and development. We found a few features in common:
• Daily streaks
• Daily custom cow
• Barn collection of cows

These features incorporate the concepts of game progression and unlocking items or achievements.

I worked with the designers and our product manager to fully map out the game experience. We defined the main sections of the map, barn, and profile, then came together to visualize how a user would be able to collect a custom cow daily, view their entire collection of cows, and manage their information. From this, we gained a clearer picture of the app’s functionalities.

Further refinement of game specifics included creating a level system to establish guidelines on the types of custom cows that users can earn. Through this, we also created game progression, which we learned from research many participants enjoyed.

Adding customization options

We introduced a feature allowing users to “build” their own profile picture. Originally, users set one by choosing one of the cows in their barn. This new feature allows users to now create a custom one by selecting a cow, cow accessory, and background color. With the available options being only what users have collected and earned thus far in the game, we believed that this could also incentivize users to play each day.

We conducted an additional round of usability testing, this time hoping to learn whether our most recent iteration improved gameplay understanding and ease of interaction.

We found that while users gained a better understanding of specific functions, a general sense of the the game was still lacking. It seemed as if we were missing a more high-level description of the game, leading me to design an additional screen to address this pain point. This new screen provides a broad description and is placed among the initial onboarding screens to prime users before they dive into the app walkthrough and learn about individual features.

We finalized copy and completed prototyping smaller interactions such as barn searching in our last round of iterations before the end of the project term. Final work for FindAMoo included a presentation where we showcased our prototype.