PlayMail
Can real-life data in digital games bring players closer to their goals?
UX Researcher | Cornell University Interaction Design Lab | June 2017
Key Responsibilities:
Research on UX Principles, UI Wireframing, Prototyping, Design Rationale, User Testing
Background
In Spring 2017, I joined the Personalized Games Team in the Interaction Design Lab, with four designers and engineers, guided by Principal Investigator Elizabeth Murnane.
Our research centered on the ability and extent of PC games driven by personal informatics to create self-awareness and behavioral change in players.
“Playing with Your Data: Towards Personal Informatics Driven Games” describes research conducted prior to my joining the team. “Games for Discovery and Reflection” outlines 3 existing variants (below) of a game designed to improve its players’ email inbox management, encouraging frequent email opens/replies. This game is called PlayMail.
PlayMail is a shoot-’em-up arcade-style game (think Space Invaders) that draws personalized data from sources like Gmail and Facebook to represent the number of unread, read, and sent emails in a player’s inbox. The objective of the game is to hit as many on-screen enemies as possible, while dodging enemy attacks, before running out of “lives.” Players are given advantages in gameplay if they maintain healthy inboxes, and vice versa.
For example, players start off with more bullets if they have sent more outgoing emails in a given day, and players face more enemies when many emails have gone unopened. In this way, PlayMail incentivizes proactive inbox awareness and management.
Variant 1: Inspired by Space Invaders
Variant 2: Inspired by Asteroids
Variant 3: Inspired by High Noon
Growing up, I spent countless hours glued to my desktop monitor, obliterating every winged beast in sight on Chicken Invaders*. I have this game to thank for some of my best childhood memories and closest friends. Years later, I was thrilled to participate in research around intentional and measurable benefits of games in this genre.
*An honorable mention goes to Bonkheads, the second biggest consumer of my time as a child.
Research Focus
To extend previous iterations of PlayMail, I studied various UI and UX strategies and principles that would strengthen the metaphor of an email inbox in our PC game. I aimed to add to the body of research on interfaces/analogies that encourage reflection and propose a new variant of PlayMail. I took on these responsibilities within the Personalized Games team to achieve these goals:
Analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the existing PlayMail variants through user testing (after IRB Human Subjects Research Training)
Studying laws of UX to incorporate into the next iteration of PlayMail
Scouring Medium and Dribbble to solidify the association between visuals of email opens/responses and general peace of mind
Selecting appropriate iconography, defining user inputs, and defining rules of gameplay
Creating low-fidelity screen mockups on Sketch and Framer to represent the email-driven battle game analogy
Modifying existing HTML/CSS code and corresponding directly with developers on the team to elicit functional design changes
Documenting design rationale and desired user outcomes
Laws of UX
Through my research, I understood the need for simplicity in an interface attempting to impart a broader message to its viewers.
PlayMail is founded on a mapping between the health of a user’s email inbox and the difficulty of gameplay. Specific visuals are employed to associate actions like opening and responding to emails with easier gameplay (a loose proxy for improved quality of life).
In my proposal, I represented the player’s pawn as a rocket ship and the enemies as incoming emails (corresponding to actual volume). I leveraged well-known principles to guide critical elements PlayMail’s UI:
Hick’s Law
The time a user takes to make a decision grows with the number and complexity of options presented in the UI.
I offered only 3 choices of avatar, and users only had to decide between “Play Again” and “Scoreboard” buttons at the game’s end.
Von Restorff Effect
Faced with a cluster of similar objects, a user is most likely to remember the object that differs from the group.
The Von Restorff Effect is seen on the “How To Play” screen, where the mail being targeted is distinctly white in a sea of black email icons.
Peak-End Rule
A user’s recollection of an experience is based on how he felt during its peak and its end.
This cognitive bias drove the immediate positive feedback for hitting an email as well as an explicit “Congratulations” screen at the conclusion of a successful game.
Proposed Redesign
Reflection
The Personalized Games team offered an aspiring designer (such as myself!) a hands-on opportunity to embed meaning into visual interfaces. I gained exposure to existing approaches to harvesting/surfacing personal informatics and various applications in personal organization and pain management.
The bulk of my work was concentrated around redesigning PlayMail. After familiarizing myself with the required programs and conducting self-led research, I proposed a set of UI options for simple and navigable gameplay, intended to promote players’ engagement with their inboxes and improve long-term emailing habits.
Looking back, I stand by my earlier choices to lower the complexity of user input and incorporate clear iconography, but now, I see that I should have put more thought into element sizing and coloring —or, alternately, scoped these variables out of initial mockups entirely, maintaining a black-and-white, line-based, initial design.
There are also some special scenarios to accommodate in PlayMail. Following my proposal, the team and I deliberated on the user journey when no new emails have been received in a given hour (our cadence for refreshing Gmail data) and the differentiation of spam mail. These conversations were especially valuable in alerting me to the layers and edge cases that must be considered to create cohesive and sensible domain-agnostic designs.