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PUPIL: LEARNING IN MIXED REALITY
FALL 2018, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
Pupil is a semester-long student project at the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), Carnegie Mellon University aiming to create educational prototypes on mixed reality platforms for the future classroom, where AR gears and spatial display are readily available as teaching tools. Through multiple prototypes, our team aims to come up with educational design patterns in AR.
The client who sponsored this project is Mark J. W. Lee, an educational technology and learning sciences researcher and practitioner, currently a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University and an adjunct senior lecturer at Charles Sturt University, Australia.
CATNIP: MEOW-NAGE YOUR WALLET ON ANDROID & IOS
SPRING 2019, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
OVERVIEW
Ruili Tang and I, students at the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) of Carnegie Mellon University, discovered our shared love for cats and common needs for a fun and minimalist tool to manage personal finance, so we initiated this project at ETC to build a gamified finance app that help people track spending and keep budget, and meanwhile have fun with a cute kitty!
PROBLEM SPACE
Through questionnaires and interviews among university students, we found 3 top reasons why they feel negatively about personal finance apps:
Complicated user interface
Mundane and repetitive routine
Not enough incentive to keep using
APPROACH
Ruili and I built on our idea of introducing a cat-raising experience into spending tracking functions, and we generated 3 design pillars based on this result:
1.
Minimalist user interface
2.
Entertaining kitty interactions
3.
Cultivating healthy financial habits
My early sketches of wireframe and concept arts
PROCESS
1. We rapidly generated user story and concept arts that met our design pillars and tested them with university students. We found that the simpler the game mechanics were, the easier users engaged with it (except gamers).
2. We were very fortunate to get advice from two cat lovers: Heather Kelley, a game designer and our project's faculty advisor, and Lewis Weil, a financial planner and the founder of Money Positive
3. Before coding, we once again summoned university students to test the core experience with digital prototype tool, and quickly gathered their feedback.
Heather helped us throughout our project on our gameplay and audience-specific design decisions.
Lewis introduced us his 50/30/20 budgeting method, which gave us crucial insights on the app features.
HIGHLIGHTS
Rewarding feedback on keeping a budget
We borrowed the reward-and-punishment system in game design to give users motivation to keep their budget. Although, the "punishment" is not harsh so as to not upset the users.
1. Create a budget on a flexible basis
2. Getting catnip every time when adding a transaction within budget
3. Get pet supplies using catnip to raise a happy kitty!
Emotionally appealing interactions
In order to encourage users to keep track of their spendings and save money, we designed a couple of cute animations including various idle status.
Meow~
Various animations of kitty idling and reactions when interacted with user
Bright, playful and easy-to-use UIs
Sticking to the simple idea of encouraging keeping budgets, we were able to bridge users' behavior in real world to virtual rewards (aka. the in-game currency, Catnip!) in a short, easy-to-pick-up closed loop.
Super simplified information architecture
UI kit
LEARNINGS
Designer-developer collaboration in a small team
Ruili and I enjoyed an agreeable culture in our small team of 2. The workflow was flexible and able to adapt changes swiftly throughout.
However, without a full-time producer (like other ETC projects), we need to self-manage tasks, time and documentation. Through this project, we found that's probably not our best strength, but gained some experience on it.
Game for behavioral change
We consulted Transformational Framework, a book by ETC faculty member Dave Culyba and built our experience on this theoretical foundation. We found the real power of transformational game is linking the virtual and the reality.
Team
Qiqi Feng - Design & Arts
(Her cat: Kiwi)
Ruili Tang - Design & Engineering
(Her cat: Anakin)
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