Brendan Washnak
Grotto
A three week project in which my team and I researched and conceptualized a solution to alter a user's mental model about beneficial activities.
Role
Design, Research
Date
April 2023
Duration
3 weeks
Project Overview
Problem
Analyzing our research, we determined that individuals who play more than 10+ hours of games throughout the week have a difficult time motivating themselves to be physically active. They also deal with potential roadblocks such as social norms, unfamiliarity with exercise methods, and often mental obstacles, like self perception and capabilities.
Solution
A passive, walking based mobile game that encourages the user to exercise throughout their day which helps establish healthy goals, habits, and motivation.
"You mean I have to go outside?" — Anonymous Student
Primary Research
Similar Apps
Our primary research consisted of an investigation into four other mobile games found on the Google Play Store, determining features that all of the games had in common, and how it could be applied to our own game.
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Real life movement
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Rewarding progression
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Daily goals
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Character customization
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Active and passive play
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We decided to use these features to boost our app to the next level, doubling down on the goals and character customization, encouraging the user to meet their goals through custom rewards, with no consequences should a goal not be met.
Source: Pokemon Go Live
Secondary Research
User Group
Our secondary research prioritized finding our ideal user group. We began by investigating general activity in adults to assist us in determining who to focus on.
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According to the World Health Organization, 28% of adults aged 18 and over were not active enough to meet the global activity recommendation every week.
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This led us to our conclusion: Age is not something we should prioritize in our development and it would be more beneficial to focus on something else that has a large user and a small barrier of entry, like games.
Methods of Motivation
Another topic of research was different methods to motivate individuals to exercise more. According to "The Role of Motives in Exercise Participation," (Ingledew and Markland, 2008) a study was done to investigate how motives affect exercise participation, the most consistent factor of someone consistently exercising was behavioral regulation.
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This further amplified our focus on goals and encouraging the user to be consistent, motivated, and driven to complete their goal each day. We believe that it is extremely important that user's want to complete the goals, not to feel obligated to.
Brainstorming
Game Idea
From the research we identified the points we should focus on for our app, leading to our app ideas:
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Step RPG
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AR town building
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Story walking game
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With feedback from our peers in class, we narrowed down our interests along with what we wanted to accomplish and decided on a walking focused RPG.
Adding Value to Walking
A question often brought up in our feedback sessions was what would be keeping people on our app. While people may use it for a week, what would keep them on the app for long term? Through our research into motivation and how behavior can be influenced through intrinsic rewards we found that rewarding in-game cosmetics as players complete their goals over an extended period of time would be best for us.
Ideation
Sketches
Sketches were the first part of the design process that we went forward with. As a team we worked with the documentation that we had created to define what we wanted in our app and how we wanted it to look.
Digital Designs
Next, we moved onto visualizing our sketches digitally, creating some basic shapes and putting it together. We worked together to determine what we liked, what we didn't, and what we needed to change.
Mockups
Finally we moved onto the final step of ideation, creating more official looking screens of our app. We created three of our four planned screens, highlighting the numerous possibilities our app holds as players progress and collect more gear to customize their character.
Initial sketches
Digital design
Initial sketches
"Wow...It's finally over. But not really." — Brendan Washnak
My Contribution
I pitched the original idea that we went with and researched similar applications, what users liked about them, which user group we should choose, and different methods to motivate our users.