Building a positive gaming experience through VUI
|Meet Rylo: a unique Voice User Interface, to help navigate the emotional roller coaster ride of a gaming session.
The Challenge:
Gamers often turn to their safe space of gaming to vent out their feelings. Negative experiences in the life of a gamer might affect how long their sessions are. This can be broken down into- personal, interpersonal and environmental causes. During these games, emotional distress combined with the intense nature of E-Sports might get exaggerated.
How might we make gaming sessions a more positive experience for the gamer?
| Other teammates: Junxiang Yao, Zi Wang and Jerome Barclay
| Mentors: Sadia Harper and Verna Bhargava
| My contributions: Leading the team, creative ideation, designing for VUI
| Time span: 4 weeks
The Needs of the Audience:
We spoke to 7 college going gamers who helped us understand the behaviour in a multi-player setting.
• Gamers can have a roller coaster of emotions during a session.
• There are two modes that gamers usually play in: In the ‘brain dead’ mode, they are playing just for kicks. In the extremely competitive mode, the game can turn pretty ugly, pretty fast.
• A code of unsaid ethics amongst the gamers evolved.
• Frustrations from real life and competitiveness in a game can lead to toxicity by a player.
• Gamers love shortcuts for everything- whatever saves them time. It is already in use in their technology and their lingo.
This helped us create the following personas.
An immersion session with gamers.
Our Design Principles:
Do not disturb the gaming session. Be useful and active when needed.
Let function inform design. Be relevant.
Gamers are intuitive & strategic. Communicate the way they do.
Reach the gamers where they are most active. Be accessible the right way.
Empathy, empathy and empathy. Design for positivity.
The Idea
“I wanted a fellow mate who’d understand what I was going through and help me through it instead of showing me down.”
A gamer’s attention is fully towards the game- their hands are busy, the mind is strategizing, their eyes don’t move away from the screen. Thus, we wanted to design around these constraints. In such an environment, voice becomes the natural way to interact, and only grabs your attention when needed.
Having a conversation with Rylo is easy. As he is plugged into your gaming session, he knows your mood, your gaming habits and is constantly learning from interactions with you.
Above: Our first prototype of the speaker. On the right: A user journey through a gaming session.
Rylo can:
• Keep a check on emotions in-game • Suggest tips & tricks for your emotions and games
• Have presets for all things during your gaming session like: Music, Ordering Food and Smart appliances
• Remind you of your notifications during an intense gaming session • Change key defaults quickly
My learnings
• Understanding a completely new audience and the baises around them • Refine Rylo through prototyping: from cheesy friend to a cool dude • A solution that stems from gaming culture • To refine the VUI persona more to make replies more holistic
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