UX/Product Design

Gates Foundation: The Brain Architecture Game Android App and Moderator & Admin Web Apps

Gates Foundation: The Brain Architecture Game Android App and Moderator & Admin Web Apps

Brain Game example Brain Game finished screens Brain Game finished screens Brain Game finished screens Brain Game finished screens Brain Game finished screens Brain Game before photo, manual tracking and scorekeeping sheet Brain Game before photo, set of cards Brain Game digital design collaboration in progress Brain Game digital design collaboration in progress Brain Game low-fidelity wireframe refinement

The Story

The Brain Architecture Game began as a tabletop educational game designed to help teach how early childhood experiences influence lifelong resilience. A joint project between the Creative Media & Behavioral Health Center at the University of Southern California, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, University of Pittsburgh, and Frameworks Institute, supported by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The game is designed to encourage a dialogue among participants in classrooms, workshops, and at conferences. It is played in teams of 4-6 individuals, with as many as 300 participants total.

The main activities in this game are "building a brain" (which you see represented with pipe-cleaners, straws, and weights) and discussing the outcomes. In addition to the supplies for building the brain, each team needs a set of playing cards and printouts of rules and scorecards, which can pose a barrier to participation. Keeping score and logging progress is a very manual process, in addition to building the brain, which should be the focus.

The Ask

  • Digitize the game for use on an Android mobile device, and eliminate the need for printouts
  • Make the interface intuitive enough that the participants' focus can be on brain-building
  • Speed up game play so more time can be spent on discussion, simplify participation, make the game accessible to a wider range of participants (including remote), and allow moderators and admins to customize the experience while accessing data collected during the games
  • Allow participants to name their team, take and share photos of their progress, alert the Moderator if they have a question, and see the general progress of other teams
  • The Moderator, who leads game play sessions, needs to see detailed progress of each team, assist teams who have a question, pause game play for all teams as needed, and perform all of this remotely
  • The Admin needs to manage app settings, permissions, game materials (think expansion packs, language, adjust level of difficulty for different audiences), and more, also remotely
  • The data points that are important to track are date/time/location of game play sessions, number of teams and participants, how many successfully built brains, how many brains "collapsed" (too much toxic stress), how long each session took, and other various metrics that were added as we progressed
  • Make game available in multiple languages and flexible enough to accommodate additional languages over time
  • Use existing brand language, tone, color palette, card and symbol design to inform styling of all new assets and content
  • Complete the project in 12 weeks

Role, Process, Who I Worked With

As the UX design lead, I worked alongside my creative director, project manager, and technical architect to gain an understanding of the requirements and overall vision from the game co-creator. Together we planned out a timeline for discovery, design, build, test.

I recommended user testing during design phase, but couldn't make it work with the timeline. I opted for some ad-hoc testing by adding enough interaction to my wireframes that they could serve as working prototype. The game can actually be played beginning to end using the wireframes, which allowed us to gauge timing and flow, and address anything clunky before heading down the path of visual design or code.

During wireframe creation I'd identified areas where foundational design production could begin, and brought in two designers to work in parallel with the UX timeline.

Key activities:

  • My team learned how the desktop game is played, received our own copy, played it multiple times
  • Worked with our client to understand the unique needs of the participants, admins, and moderators, and identified over 40 user stories to start with
  • Within two weeks of our first onsite visit with the client, I created all wireframes for the Android game app, Admin web app, and Moderator web app
  • I led solutioning workshops and low- and high-fidelity design review sessions for multiple iterations for each of the three products we were building
  • Developed design tasks and timelines for the three product workstreams to make best use of economy of scale and allow for iterative design
  • Oversaw all UI design and prototype crowdsourcing challenges, writing design specs for our community (TopCoder), vetting submissions, and overseeing the selection process
  • Budgeted for, hired, and managed contractors for production work (two designers and one developer), coordinated their assignments, timeline, and payments
  • Worked closely with developers to ensure consistency between design and prototype production

The Result

Our client was very happy with what we demoed at the completion of the project. We finished on time and within budget, and received an easy sign-off.

At last status update, all assets and code were handed off to the client who took ownership of beta testing and all subsequent development and feature addition.

In Retrospect

The topic of early childhood experiences and resiliency is something I care about deeply. It was very rewarding to get to work with someone whose game makes such a lasting impact to its participants. Helping see her vision through to take the game to the next level was a great experience.

I would have loved the opportunity to test this incrementally with users, interview or survey them, or at least observe a group playing the game using the app. I'd want to know if the digital version succeeded in increasing participation. Was it as easy to use as we'd hoped? Were players able to move through the steps more quickly and have more time at the end for discussion? Were there any small improvements we might have been able to accommodate in a second round of updates? Due to budgetary and timeline constraints, we were unable to do a proper follow-up.

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