This week (Apr.18 – Apr.24) we finalized on all the details and built a soft version of the experience. We sent out the link to high schoolers to playtest on our target audience, and also to ETC faculty for soft opening feedback.
Progress
User Experience
During the playtest, we found that many people was eager to jump into the system and they skipped the instruction at the very beginning. As a result, they had no idea on how to trigger the interaction with objects(mini-games, quizzes, etc.) in the world. To help with those users, we added a hint banner on the UI, which will pop out whenever the character gets near to the interactable objects.
We updated the instruction steps and the pamphlet UI to help users better read the texts.
New Functionality
Given the fact that it takes a long time to load the web page, we designed a loading animation to make it less bored waiting.
Peter designed a sound booth on the second floor of the plaza. It is used to play the podcasts that Samira sent us earlier.
We got feedback that some might not be able to connect the spiky blue ball and the blue “tornado” with the “mini-golf” badge we designed. Therefore, we changed the name to “spiky gold” and added a pole with a flag at the target of the golfs to help users connect visually.
Next Steps
We are excited to see that many of the faculty were having a good time experiencing our world and gave us lots of positive and constructive feedback. We do realize that there are some small glitches to fix, and some good-to-have function that we still need to work on. We will leave the next week for final polish and paper work such as tech documentation and post-mortem.