The members of our team came into this project with some to little knowledge about the UCD process. Over nine weeks, our team experienced each step in the UCD process firsthand and learned a great deal about the social benefits of games, especially given the COVID-19 pandemic. After extensive research, design, and prototyping, we are thrilled with INNERnet, a product that holds the potential to increase inclusivity in gaming spaces as more people turn to games for socialization. Looking back, we see as much room for improvement as potential.
INNERnet holds the explicit mission to ease creation and discoverability of safer spaces for those with historically marginalized identities in social gaming circles. Given this, an immediate concern even for participants in our user research remains the issue of toxicity and banning, especially in these gaming communities. In our design process, we considered bad-faith actors by requiring a phone number for registration rather than simply an email. However, another consideration we spent little time on includes younger users. While INNERnet requires people to be 13-years old or older, this age still encapsulates cognitively developing adolescents and young adults. Neither teenagers nor children were included in our research and evaluations. If given time and resources to reiterate, our team would need to consider the misuse of identity tags, the implications of teenagers and young adults meeting strangers online, and the navigation of bad-faith actors who target vulnerable or unprotected populations.
Further, if the duration of our project were extended, our team would focus on the addition of a community search function. In our research, we found that people tend to engage with online gaming communities to connect with other like-minded individuals as well as obtain game knowledge and skills. This differs from how people form teams to cooperate or even compete with each other in pursuit of a certain goal or objective within a game. Therefore, we believe that a community search function could promote greater social fulfillment and immersion in games for users by allowing them to join communities based on preferences like size, platform, and purpose.
On that note, we also feel that users of INNERnet could benefit from the ability to set their own chat rules and guidelines. For example, the live-streaming platform, Twitch, gives users the option to customize a display of channel rules that first-time viewers must agree to before writing any messages. Under such a system, users are able to moderate their own chats in real time and encourage safe, positive chat experiences. If we were to implement this system in INNERnet, it would add an additional layer of protection against bad-faith actors while providing users with a means of engaging respectfully with their matches, who will, most often, be strangers.
While time was one of our biggest constraints, we also experienced challenges related to remote group work and the larger scope of our project. Because of the convenience of remote work, we only met through Zoom during our predesignated meeting times. Although working remotely accommodated each of our needs, it became a challenge to keep each other accountable for meeting times and group work. Furthermore, it became difficult to refine the details of our project and focus on simplifying our design. However, we adapted and worked together to address these issues. For example, we started meeting on weekends when we were all available. We also put all of our work in Figma, which allowed us to easily delegate responsibilities of each assignment and see real-time changes. Making these adjustments ultimately allowed us to accomplish our goals within our project deadlines.
Reflecting over the UCD process, the lack of competitors in this problem space stood out. While Discord or Reddit allow for discovering public communities based on specific games, they can be comprised of thousands to nearly a million people. INNERnet focuses on finding smaller groups or individual people with whom to play games. While stranger-meeting sites such as Omegle also exist, these individual setups are not catered to social gaming unlike INNERnet.
Additionally, the low reports of exclusive experiences in personal gaming circles from our user research surprised our team. While we understand the systemic issues that exist within the gaming industry, our limited sample of participants (n=3) may or may not reflect a greater experience of mostly inclusive experiences with established social circles contrasted to random in-game matching or game-based toxic communities.
Overall, given the many components of this project, we had to divide it up into many parts. For each group assignment, we started by reading over and discussing its specifications together. Doing this became essential for us to be on the same page and to avoid confusion. We looked over the examples provided, which were really helpful in gauging which direction to take the project. Inspired by the examples, we brainstormed in Figma and wrote down all of our thoughts on notes. After organizing, we then returned to the assignment requirements and delegated tasks to each member. We often worked on our tasks remotely and met during the predesignated times to check-in with each other and share our thoughts on our designs. By systematizing this process, we learned how to work successfully as a team and ultimately came out with an end result that we can be proud of.