The solution
Investigate current experience
I started off by taking a new look at the game. This time with a structure in mind. I decided to evaluate the experience from my own perspective first, as to air out my own thoughts.
Currently this is the experience in short: While playing you are upgrading and improving your own franchise of bed & Breakfast’s around the map. At each new location you unlock new features that add a challenge or mechanic that you’ll have to learn, manage and master.
In this case study I’m looking at the cooking mechanic which is discovered at the third B&B location. First you learn how to build the necessary kitchen appliances and kitchen itself. Then we learn about picking and buying ingredients. Shortly after that we learn our first recipe.
The screen below is what a player might see when opening this interface. Granted this photo is taken from my own play-through and doesn’t represent what it could look like for another user playing for the first time.
Some things I’d highlight from these insights is my struggle with navigating the menus. To move from the recipes to my inventory I intuitively move the left stick. This doesn’t work, on screen there are buttons that indicate that I’ll have to use the direction arrows to select what menu I’d like to interact with.
I saw this as a big point of friction, combined with the small text and icon size causing eye-strain even when played on tv. I had several times “rage-quit” because I could never fully master these controls.
Research
I continued research by conducting in-person observations, interviews and play-testing. By meeting face to face I could not only ask about their previous (if any) knowledge of Bear & Breakfast or other casual management sim games, I could also observe them playing the game and have them freely summarise the experience to me afterwards.
In total there were 3 interviewees, I’ll summarise the participants below.
Young professional, Software Developer - Little to no previous game genre experience
- Perspective of a new player with no previous casual management sim game experience
- Passionate and frequent consumer of video games of other genres
Young professional, Architect - Avid video game player and consumer
- Speak from the perspective of a person who’s just started their own novice project within game development
- Critical and keen eye when dissecting the entertainment he engages with
University Student, Degree of candidate in Film Studies
- Often and enthusiastically plays casual management sim games, but not this title.
- Give insights from a users perspective that plays similar titles on the Nintendo Switch
The combination of freely speaking and then transitioning to hands-on experience with the cooking mechanic in the game greatly served me in my research. I transcribed insights from the session afterwards and started to collect individual insights.
Define
I used the Atomic research model to distill insights from my interview facts. I gathered 8 common themes and ideas and wrote them down as to create opportunities from these fact-based insights. The Distilled insights where as follows:
By using the atomic model I could turn these insights into opportunities I wanted to explore in the next stage. These would be defined as actionable designs or questions for me to explore.
Ideation
I’ve also removed the need to place the ingredients once by one in the interface. Instead I’ve opted for matching the cooking method card to the correct ingredient. Keeping the right amount of challenge.
