Multiplex Process Book

California Polytechnic State University Art and Design Department Art 388: Interaction Design II Winter 2016 Professor Bruno Ribeiro

Multiplex One digital board for all games

Lena Choi Chelsea Navarro

15 May 2017

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Art 388: Interaction Design II Winter 2016 Multiplex Choi Navarro

Art 388: Interaction Design II Winter 2016 Multiplex Choi Navarro

Table of Contents

Introduction

Introduction 3 Abstract 3 Schedule 4 Audience 5 Technical requirements and constraints

Abstract

Research 6 Preliminary research design Findings from the research Personas 11 Goals 11 Competitive analysis Scenario 16 Wireframes 18

User interface design Annotated layouts 28 Final Product 37 Future enhancements

The Multiplex allows all types of games to be played on one digital platform, giving users easy access to a variety of games. It is portable and user-friendly for all ages and it runs on wireless electricity. This board comprises of multiple magnetic touch screens/ tablets that you assemble according to the type of game you would like to play. This product is different because it provides easy entertainment anywhere without carrying the physical copies of the games.

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Usability analysis 23 Usability analysis tests 23 Usability analysis results 23 Changes from the results of usability analysis 28

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Schedule

Audience

Week 2: Jan 11–17

Our primary audience are college students, ages 18–25, who enjoy playing board games occasionally as well as students who like board games, but rarely get to play them. Our secondary audience are people of all ages, ranging from children to adults.

As well as different types of social groups such as families, friends, and co-workers who enjoy playing board games.

Interview 6-8 people Collect data and write up research

Week 3: Jan 18–24

Turn in research Develop personas and goals

Week 4: Jan 25–31

Turn in updated report Produce sketches

Week 5: Feb 1–7

Turn in updated report Create usability test design and analysis Design interactive wireframes

Week 6: Feb 8–14

Bring in user for usability test

Week 7: Feb 15–21

Turn in updated report Choose visual language Develop high-definition static mock-ups

Week 8: Feb 22–28

Turn in updated report Create static and interactive high-definition mock-ups

Week 9: Feb 29–Mar 6

Turn in functional mock-up Work on interactive mock-ups

Week 10: Mar 7–13

Turn in updated report Work on interactive mock-ups

Week 11: Mar 14

Turn in final report and final presentation

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Technical requirements and constraints Multiplex is a portable game board that can be played anywhere from outside parks, from peoples’ houses, and even in transportation like train rides. Therefore, the technological advancements Multiplex relies on are fast wireless Internet (to access the apps) and wireless electricity. It also depends on detachable touch screens that are connected to each other with magnets. The possible constraints with this application are the glitches and malfunctions that may occur with the touch screens’ pixels and functions. Also, because the screens are detachable, problems may occur with trying to connect the screens properly. Lastly, Multiplex is heavily dependent on wireless electricity, thus, if there is ever a power outage, it is impossible to play with it.

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Research

ten characters and the objective is to capture the opponent’s flag without getting caught or revealed by the opponent. She enjoys this game because it involves using a lot of strategy.

Preliminary research design

Crystal 22, Mechanical Engineering Student

What is your favorite and least favorite aspects of playing board/card games?

How do you decide on what games to play?

When or where do you usually play games? Explain.

When you play a games for the first time, how do you process the rules of the game? (house rules?)

What is your favorite game? Explain. (favorite, least favorite part? why?)

What was the most memorable experience you had playing board games?

Findings from the research Katherine 22, Computer Science Student “What I like about playing board games is that it is a good party game where it’s fun to see different people’s reactions, but it’s hard to play different games away from home because it is a hassle to carry multiple boxes.”

Katherine’s favorite aspects of playing board games are seeing different reactions that people express and having fun without using electronics. Her least favorite aspect is that she has to carry around multiple boxes for different games. She decides on what game to play based on what people want to play and what games would suit the certain type of people she plays with. She usually plays board games at parties, hangouts, and family gatherings, since she can’t play by herself. She usually likes to play indoors, but is willing to play outdoors as long as the game does not involve cards.

She finds it more likely to lose her cards outdoors than indoors.

When she plays a game for the first time she reads the rule book step by step.

Her favorite board game is Stratego which is a two-player strategy game involving

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“It’s a great way to involve multiple people in an activity, but for some games, it’s hard to play when there’s only two people.”

Crystal’s favorite aspect of board games is that they are a great way to involve multiple people in an activity, but the downside to them is that it is hard to play when there is only two people. She decides on what game to play depending on who is playing (like what people prefer), how many people are playing and where the game is taken place such as a friend’s house or in a cafe.

When playing a game for the first time, usually there is one person who explains the rules and the group plays 1–2 rounds of the game slowly and refer back to the rules when necessary. If she is the only one that doesn’t know the rules she reads the rules and observe others. Usually, she and her friends follow the rules, but if they have played a game for many times and want something different, they add their own rules to make it more challenging.

Her favorite is Catan which is a 3–4 player game that is based on luck and players have to use strategic tactics to expand their settlement and invest their resources. The downside of the game is that it’s best played with exactly four players and you need to buy the expansion pack to play with more people (5–6 players). Usually her most memorable experiences involve backstabbing friends she trusted in the game and see other players fail or make mistakes.

Andy 20, Computer Science Student “My favorite part of board games is the face-to-face social aspect of them but I don’t like the clunkiness of the rules.”

Andy’s favorite aspect of board games is the face-to-face and social interaction they creates between people. His least favorite aspect of board games are the clunky and confusing rules. He usually chooses games to play based on what games he had fun with before. He usually plays board games at home with his friends or at his friends’ houses over the weekends.

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When playing a game for the first time he usually has a friend explain the rules, but if no one has played the game before, they would usually follow the rules step-by-step. In addition, he and his friends usually follow the original rules of the game but improvise when they do not understand the rules.

games. She dislikes it when people get too serious and angry because when she was younger she was playing a game with her sister and Casey ended up beating her, so her sister got really mad and threw the remote at the couch, which bounced off and ended up hitting Casey in the face.

His favorite game is The Resistance: Avalon which is a game where players are either loyal servants of Arthur or are servants of the evil ways of Mordred. The Good wins the game by succeeding the three quests while the evil wins when the three quests end in failure or they assassinate Merlin. He enjoys playing the game since it involves having dialogues with their roles but the downside is that the roles of the players are announced in the beginning of each round which is not very fun. Despite that, his most memorable experience is being able to have crazy conversations that happen during a round if a game, not the game itself.

Casey discussed that it depends on her mood when she wants to play a certain game, such as a long game, short game, strategy game, lying game, etc. Usually she learns from someone else who played the game before or she reads the rulebook.

Steven 22, Computer Science Student

Tammy 21, Psychology Student

“My least favorite part about playing board games is when you have to set up and clean up the game because it takes too much time and effort. I just want to start playing right away.”

Steven’s favorite part about playing board games is communicating with other people face-to-face rather than online when playing computer or video games. However, he doesn’t like to set up the board games and clean up after playing them. Depending on the number and type of people playing, he decides which game to play. He usually likes to play at night at his home because that is where he keeps all his board games. His strategy to learn new games is to watch Youtube videos on them because it is a more visual way to learn the game.

He discusses that One Night Werewolf is his favorite game to play because you can play with a big group of people and it is quick to play. He says that playing Settlers of Catan started his whole fascination with board games and finds it to be one of his most memorable experience playing games.

Casey 21, Liberal Studies Student “I personally like board games over video games because you get to interact with people instead of staring at a screen. You don’t get to play with a lot of people when you play video games.”

Casey loves to win because she says she is very competitive when it comes to games.

She likes the competition and the interaction between people while playing board

Her favorite game to play at the moment is Coup because it involves deception and strategy. Her most memorable experience of playing board games is when she played One Night Werewolf for the first time with a group of friends starting at 6 PM to 4 AM in the morning.

“My favorite aspect of playing board/card game is being able to spend fun times with my friends, but I don’t like too many rules and confusing directions.”

Tammy’s favorite aspects of playing board games are being able to play and have fun with her friends. Her least favorite aspect is that they usually have too much or confusing directions. She usually decides on what game to play based on how many people there are to play with or if she is alone. Most of the time, she usually plays games with her friends and others whenever she is at indoor parties.

When she plays a game for the first time, she prefers to have an individual who has played the game before to explain the rules as she rarely reads the instructions of the game. In addition, in for most games, she prefers to follows the rules of the game.

Her favorite game is Cranium which involves teams of two try to succeed in tasks to move across the entire board game. The team who reaches the Cranium Central and finishes the final task wins. She enjoys the game because it involves everyone’s participation and each turn is different. Her favorite part of the game is the charades category since people usually laugh at each other as they perform the task. Her least favorite part is the guessing category because most of the items/characters/music being guessed are not familiar to all the players. She thinks every board game she plays with other people is memorable since she does not play board games often despite liking board games

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Monorom 22, Kinesiology Student

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Personas

“I don’t really like playing new, complicated board games because I’m too lazy to read the rule book and I just learn better visually, like when other people play it before me.”

Monorom enjoys hanging out and bonding with friends and family when playing board games, but he hates learning new board games and complicated rules. He usually plays at his friends’ houses or occasionally at home with his sister. He says he learns better watching people play a game rather than reading the rulebook.

His favorite game is Clue because it is fun and you get to think a lot. He also discusses that Coup is another one of his favorites because he enjoys seeing the reactions people give when he deceives them and tell them the truth afterwards. However, he does not like it when people target him because he is too good at a certain game. His memorable experience with board games is a time when he played Monopoly with his aunt and cousins growing up because that was the first time he ever played a board game.

Roseanne is 21 years old and attends Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She is a computer engineering student and she likes to play all kinds of games (computer, video, board, and card games) with friends and family. She prefers to process new information through visual demonstrations rather than reading through text. She is very competitive when it comes to playing games and enjoys the quality time she spends with her friends and family. She mostly spends her time indoors because it is a hassle to carry games with her when she goes out to hang out. Her favorite games are Settlers of Catan and One Night Werewolf because they involve strategy and interaction with a lot of players.

Goals Her goal is to be able to play a lot of games wherever she goes without the hassle of bringing bulky items and losing pieces or parts to the game. Another goal is that she can look at the instructions of the games visually through videos or picture demos.

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Competitive analysis

Epawn Arena: digital board game tabletop that interacts with pieces

Ipad with the board game app: Ipawn

Lenovo touchscreen tabletop PC

RCA GameFrame: a foldable LCD touchscreen board game

Androids with board game apps

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Physical board games

Gamechanger Game Board for iPad

Physical card games

Ultimate Board Game Collection on the Wii

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User interaction design Scenario Over the summer break Roseanne wants to hangout with her close friends. She decides to throw a small dinner party at her place. After earing and catching up with her friends, Roseanne thinks of ways to entertain her guests. She decides to play board games with her Multiplex because it would be a fun way to interact with all of her friends. She grabs her Multiplex from her closet and sets it up in her living room. She asks her friends what game they want to play and swipes through the screen to see their options. Most of her friends choose the game Settlers of Catan, but one of her friends doesn’t know the rules of the game. Roseanne shows her friend the rules of the game as well as a video demo. As soon as her friend understands how to play, they begin to play the game. After a good game of Catan, they switch to a different game, One Night Werewolf, which they played until two in the morning. Her friends leave her house and she is left to clean up her place. She easily grabs and stacks her Multiplex and stores it back in her closet.

Sketches

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Wireframes

Purchased

Game Store

Categories

Updates

Categories

Adventure

Card Games

Casino

Classics

Educational

Fantasy

Puzzle

Role-Play

Loading...

Purchased

Game Store

Categories

Purchased

Game Store

Categories

Updates

Purchased

Game Store

Categories

Updates

Updates

Updates

Purchased

Battleship Update

Battleship

One Night Ultimate Werewolf

Update

Purchased

Game Store

Settlers of Catan

Categories

Stratego

Purchased

Updates

Game Store

~ ` Agon

Anti-Monopoly

Battleship

Blockade

$6.99

$4.99

Purchased

$3.99

Caps

Shift

Battleship

1

Update

2

3

Q

W

A

Chess

Cranium

Evo

$1.99

$1.99

$5.99

$4.99

One Night Ultimate Werewolf

5

E

S Z

Checkers

4

R

D X

7

T

F C

Settlers of Catan

6

Y

G V

8

U

H B

0

I

J N

Stratego

9

O

K M

-

P

L ,

+

[

; .

‘ /

Delete

]

\

Enter Shift

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Purchased

Game Store

Categories

Rules ResetThe Night Quit All players go to sleep at the start of the

Picture yourself in the era of discoveries: after a long voyage of great deprivation, your ships have finally reached the coast of an uncharted island. Its name shall be Catan! But you are not the only discoverer.

Other fearless seafarers have also landed on the shores of Catan: the race to settle the island has begun!

RULES

players with a Villager, Tanner, or Hunter card never wake up at night.

Update

The Day

themselves who they believe the Werewolves

Images

Tutorial

if everyone votes in the same direction around the table, with each player receiving one vote (decide this as a group before you vote).

Game End

After just one night and one day...

The village team wins:

might want to claim to be a different role so that

more players who are not Werewolves die in

other players’ cards, some players will believe

village team wins.

different one. After the night phase, your role is

is possible for no one to be a Werewolf if all

may be different than your original P2 role. No one

P3 The werewolf team only wins if at least one

1) If at least one Werewolf dies. Even if one or

they don’t die. Because certain roles change

addition to a Werewolf dying, everyone on the

they are one role, when they are actually a

2) If no one is a Werewolf and no one dies. It

the card that is currently in front of you, which

Werewolf cards are in the center.

The player with the most votes dies and reveals

his card. In case of a tie, all players tied with the

TIMER 3:00

Updates

P1

never show their card to anyone. Werewolves

After a few minutes of discussion, players vote.

Categories

dies. One way the players might achieve this is

are. All players may say anything, but may

may look at any cards after the night phase.

Game Store

player receives more than one vote, no one

on at night to do a night action. However,

After the night phase, players discuss amongst

Purchased

most votes die and reveal their cards. If no

game. There are several roles that are called

Number of Players: 3-6 Number of Game Squares: 4

Tutorial

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Updates

Settlers of Catan

Play

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Rules Reset Quit

player is a Werewolf and no Werewolves are

killed. If you are playing with the Tanner, there are special rules regarding who wins; see the Tanner’s role description for details.

START

PLAYER 1 CHANGE NAME

Settlers of Catan Picture yourself in the era of discoveries: after a long voyage of great deprivation, your ships have finally reached the coast of an uncharted island. Its name shall be Catan! But you are not the only discoverer.

Other fearless seafarers have also landed on the shores of Catan: the race to settle the island has begun!

Number of Players: 3-6 Number of Game Squares: 4

Play

Tutorial

PLAYER 1

Update The seer can look at one other player’s card or two cards from the center.

Images

hide

Images

3 4 5 6 7 8

PLAYERS

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3

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Usability analysis

4 5 6 7

Usability analysis tests

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PLAYERS

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3

Navigate to One Night Werewolf tutorial and watch video tutorial.

Play One Night Werewolf with 8 players.

Exit One Night Werewolf and play Catan with 3 players.

Usability analysis results

PLAYER 1

Rules Reset Quit reveal

P6 villager

seer

troublemaker

minion

robber

werewolf

drunk

werewolf

P5

Test #2 If possible, we would like to embed the tutorial video on the app instead of opening another tab.

There was the common mistake of finding how to changes the number of players.

The switching of games was pretty easy for her to navigate.

P1

P4 P2 P3

TIMER 3:00

Test #1 When the user was on the tutorial video and went back to the Multiplex app he had to click one night werewolf again to play the game.

He also was a bit confused on how to play with 8 players for One Night Werewolf, so that would have to be more prominent to show that you can change the number of players.

START

Test#3 It was confusing trying to increase the number of players. The user did not attempt to press the number, but instead went for the forward arrow hoping it would increase the number of players.

User used a lot of swiping motion while using Multiplex, which means we should also design how the app would react when people swipe around in the page. Maybe add some swiping features since people swipe around pages nowadays.

Test#4 User was very confused whether she was already in the tutorial page or not. The tabs did not “react� or change enough to notice that she was on that tab.

User also had trouble increasing the number of players because she was not aware you had to tap on the number.

User had no trouble switching to another game.

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Test#5 User had no trouble going to the tutorial.

User also could not tell that you had to increase the number of players by tapping the number and changing the number.

User also used a different way to go back to the home menu which was using the back button of the actual web browser instead of using the back button in the app.

Changes from the results of usability analysis

All the tabs such as the “Tutorial” and “Images” are closer together in order to make it more visible that they are tabs. Also the updated button is more greyed out to indicate the app can not be updated.

A description tab was included so users can understand more about the app and its updates.

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The selection of players is changed to display all of the numbers instead of having a drop down.

There are more added game categories since there were a few categories before.

An extra screen to show what happens when a game is updated.

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User interface design Annotated layouts

Variations for the Catan description page

Variations for the category page

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Variations for the number of players selection page

Variations for the Catan game page

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Loading...

Rough draft of the loading page

Rough draft of categories section

Rough draft of store section with different games

Rough draft of My Apps section

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Rough draft of description page.

Rough drafts of connecting and player screens.

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Final Product

This is the loading screen once the user turns on the Multiplex board.

Roughs drafts of game screens

This is the sign in page that pops after the loading screen

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Users can view their account information by tapping on the “Account Info” link.

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Users can search through the game store to purchase games they want.

Users’ purchases are stored in the My Apps page.

Users can also search for games by genre in the Categories page.

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Depending on the game this screen will appear indicating the additional Multiplex screens needed in order to play the game. User must attach the screens at this stage.

Once a user searches or purchases an app, she/he is directed to a description page that provides information about the game. This is also where the user can start playing the game by hitting the “Play� button.

User taps in how many players there are.

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Future enhancements Multiplex is a unique game product that may later on not only apply to different board games apps but also video games apps as well. It has potential to turn into a new kind of gaming experience for children and everyone. Because Multiplex is quite similar to a tablet, it can be another alternative in using tablets. This means not only apps can be used but it can perform tasks such as connecting to the Internet with a web browser or playing videos and music.

Game layout of Multiplex’s Chess.

Game layout of Monopoly and Settlers of Catan games.