Power Play

An engaging way for kids to learn about government

Role

Product & Visual Designer, UX Researcher

Team

Arsh Saroya, Feven Debela, Asikur Rahman, Nathnael Solomon

Timeline

October – December 2018

The brief

Middle school kids from the board game club at Seattle Academy asked my team and I to create a product that would teach them about government. Over ten weeks, we created a tablet-based app with interactive stories and trivia to reinforce learning.

Research

Methods

We interviewed three students from Seattle Academy's board game club to find out what they wanted to learn about government. We then interviewed three similarly-aged kids to about how they learn best and what games they like. Finally, we distributed a survey to five kids. Ages ranged from 10-14.

Findings

Digital games preferred over physical games
Multiplayer is more fun because of the competitive aspect
A compelling storyline makes a game fun
Visual and anecdotal learning styles preferred
No one had taken a government class

Design goals

Drawing on our research, we decided our product should be:

A digital game
Interactive
Multiplayer-capable
Turn-based (asynchronous)
Based on skill, not chance

Designing for with users

Co-design with Kids

We visited Seattle Academy's board game club to run a co-design exercise. Participants had 10 minutes to individually brainstorm ideas for a game about government. Then, we paired them up and asked them to combine the best elements of their ideas to create a new game.

Ideation

As a team, we sketched out ideas and used affinity diagramming to group ours and the kids’ ideas. We narrowed down to three concepts based on our research and design goals.

In Government RPG, users play as a political figure to discover their responsibilities. This satisfied our goals for an interactive, digital, and skill-based game.

Trivia, which allows competing with friends, covers various government topics. This satisfied our turn-based multiplayer requirement.

Build Your Own Country, the combination of the kids’ ideas, has players create a country with the political ideology of their choosing. Users develop skill trees as well as trade with or conquer other countries. This met our skill-based and interactive goals.

Honesty is the best policy

Paper & HiFi Prototypes

By combining the best elements of our earlier ideas, we created a game that has two major components: learning and trivia. To gain knowledge, users play through interactive scenarios that set them up for trivia, which reinforces learning. After receiving critique on our paper prototype, we created a hi-fi version, which we tested with our users.

Usability Testing

With four members of Seattle Academy's board game club, we tested our hi-fi prototypes and received some brutal feedback (kids don't hold back).

Story questions should increase in difficulty
More interactive scenarios needed for learning section
Feedback for whether questions were answered correctly should be more clear
Most participants chose to play trivia first
Incorrect answers should have consequences

Finishing touches

Visual Design

I took on defining our visual design and branding for this project. For an app centered around government, my first instinct was to match our primary colors to those of the two major parties. However, I didn't want to create or reinforce bias in our young users. In the spirit of bipartisanship, I chose the result of mixing red and blue — purple. For the dark value, I chose a purple-tinted black, thus avoiding true black.

Style Guide

Illustrations

In the learning module of our app, illustrations accompany a story to keep users engaged. I defined the style of these illustrations to be simple but interesting and colorful without being over the top, as many apps for kids are.

Final Mocks

The story-based learning section guides the user through scenarios followed by questions to test retention.

Each question is followed by an explanation describing why the user's choice was correct or incorrect.

With trivia, players can compete with friends while reinforcing learning.

Trivia requires users to apply their knowledge from the scenarios to more traditional, conceptual questions.

Reflection

As with any quarter-long project, time was the biggest constraint. If I had more time, I would focus on vetting the content with a subject matter expert. Our writer majored in political science, but we would've also sought feedback from the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance at UW. Given more time, we also intended to further gameify the product and test with a more diverse group of users. Lastly, I would refine the app's visual design further, particularly by improving the illustrations and making them more stylistically consistent.

I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to design with and for kids. Creating something that not only expanded their minds but also brought them excitement was an amazing experience. It helped me realize that my goal as a designer is to solve problems and create joy.