Wherigo v2: User Research

[+Mangatome]

Hi all! Following the very prolific thread Feature List, I would like to fork some attention to the process of UX research for Wherigo 2. We have seen that a lot of ideas, desires and frustrations exist in the community, and I believe that as a community, our first step should be to gather these thoughts and feelings a bit systematically, in order to understand ourselves a bit better and to help us prioritize and organize. To that end, I'm proposing a process called user experience research or just user research.

 

There are various tools and methodologies that we could use for this but for simplicity I think we should begin by surveying the community of Wherigo enthusiasts using one or two surveys that will aim at understanding what works and what doesn't in v1, see how people use players and builders, what the relationship is with programming, etc. This will get us a wide spectrum of thoughts. It would also be nice to prepare some more in-depth live interviews with some users, in order deepen our understanding of the whole experience of Wherigo.

 

From these, I would like to eventually get to a few user personas which are, in a nutshell, characters that represent user types. I think we implicitly have two types, Wherigo players and Wherigo authors, but these are too broad and I suspect there are going to be sub-types (e.g. casual author, player who only plays in groups...) that are crucial to identify.

 

I'm starting this thread to get some help with this process. The first step would be to design some surveys (suggestions appreciated!) and later we'd need help to disseminate them among the community.

[Ranger Fox]

Perhaps people fall into these groups:

 

Players:

• Someone who does not know anything about Wherigo
• First-time player, either good with technology (most younger people) or is scared of new apps (my mother)
• A player who knows that you go to locations with Wherigo, but does not know you also have NPCs and items
• A player who is confident about their knowledge and would just need to know about changes

Authors:

• A first-time author, grouped into one of two buckets: script kiddie or better, someone who doesn't know (and shouldn't care) what's involved in making a cartridge
• Someone who would just like to create a basic type of cartridge, or one that can be templated into a point-and-click process
• Someone who is now familiar enough with cartridges and would be willing to learn a little more to create something different.  This person would be a great candidate for looking at code/widget snippets to implement them inside their cartridge.  They might not understand the code behind it, but they understand that to get the effect they want, they have to have two zones and one item supplied to the widget to use it.
• Good with UI or code, but not both
• A group of people who would need to edit the same cartridge, sharing it back and forth, to create something
• Someone who would prefer just to work with the code and not with a builder application
• Someone from a parks and recreation department or park worker who is looking to create a tour of their park.  This person has some organizational backing, but not much experience doing anything with Wherigo or coding in general.  They might want to create something like a passport book, where visiting different areas will reward you with stamps in the book, and some way to turn in a completed passport book for a prize or something.  (I've seen several instances outside Wherigo of agencies trying to do this.)

Does that help?  Anyone with comments or opinions?

[+Mangatome]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'd be curious to see if we can factor some of these, and get estimates on proportions of the general audience falling into these categories. We can't really guess that without evidence, hence the process I mentioned above, and tools like surveys, etc.

 

Regarding the surveys, I'm thinking it could help us answer some questions raised by your thread Feature List, such as:

• What does the community like about v1?
• What does the community dislike about v1?
• What features does the community lack in v1?

It could also help us prioritize some features, asking the community to order or rate the importance of some feature ideas.