Overview:

During my time at a software development company―in fact, not long after I’d started―the marketing manager asked if I’d be interested in providing UI/UX support for a team working on improvements for our rendition of Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe. The organization uses the game during conferences to both showcase developers’ talents and attract attendees to the company’s booth. I have experience with game design/gamification, I love playing games of all kinds, and I was eager to get to know more of my coworkers. I was happy to help out!

Challenge:

The team also asked for manageable improvements, which happened to be constrained by limiting the number of developer hours that could be spent implementing changes. To manage this constraints, I felt the best approach would involve thoroughly contextualizing feedback and prioritizing project needs based on the potential scale and impact for each decision alternative.

Furthermore, while the rest of the team was intimately familiar with the game’s rules and programming, I was not—which I count as both a challenge and an opportunity.

Strategy:

When it comes to play-testing, there are few substitutes to match insights gained first-hand. I had the game and touchscreen setup in an accessible, high-traffic common room so that I and others could have convenient access to the game. The game offers two play options: a one-player mode with a human playing against the computer and a two-player mode with two humans playing against each other. I interacted with the game using both, including against and while observing other human players. 

As it turns out, my experiences and observations largely mirrored feedback captured from others’. I also noticed higher than expected rates of abandonment after just a few moves, especially when a human played against the computer. I grouped similar pain points together, cascaded the groups, and then identified the most “upstream” issue to form a user story that summarized the problem like this:

As either an observer or player, it is difficult to remember which board has just been played and/or which will be played next, so I am unable to form my own or follow another’s playing strategy

I brought to this organization and all my projects a love of collaboration facilitated by agile workflow methodologies. I planned for two time-flexible in person working sessions (one for the beginning and one toward the end) to discuss problems and potential solutions as a team, despite the worry that these meetings might lead to scope creep or eat into valuable development time. Also, while I did not force the formal use of user stories to capture scenarios and acceptance criteria during the meetings, I used the language of user stories to structure our discussions and guide quality assurance testing. The process worked well!

In the end, we introduced simple interface modifications designed to orient users to the “rhythm” and direction of gameplay following each turn. A handful of small changes had an immediate impact on engagement, and we achieved these successes within scope to the delight of all involved.