LABYRINTH

UI / UX Designer

PROJECT BRIEF

CHALLENGES

MY ROLE

Create a digital escape room experience, designed to engage and meet the needs of older adults through elements of real life and online escape room games and puzzles, interactive storytelling, and virtual reality.

How to engage older adults in new technology
How to develop a cross-platform VR experience
How to create UI for a VR game
Create low-polycount 3D assets but still provide enough details

Design a user interface suitable for VR
Design, prototype, user test and iterate on our user experience
Designed all the 3D models
Complete all the textures for 3D models

DESIGN PROCESS

1. Research

We set up meeting with our client to target their goal and learn about the problem they are trying to solve. Then we research and analyze the similar products in the market and brainstorming with our teammates, list our strength an weakness so we can provide the best features for our client.

2. User Stories/ Persona

We interview the target audience and conduct research to get the in depth-knowledge of users' behaviour and background. By using tools like creating persona and user stories, we can learn about what's the need of the users and satisfy the broader group of people represented by the archetype.

3. Storyboard and User Flow

Storyboard are created to visualize the interaction and followed by user flow to communicate the interactions with the team members. It is the structure plan that provides the team the idea of the whole experience in a greater scale. It provides different views of responsive design, screen layout, content location and unique interactions.

4. Rapid Prototype

From the low fidelity paper prototype, to med fidelity grey box frames, 3D-printed prototype to high fidelity digital mock-ups, we as a team experienced rapid prototyping and every design decision was made by several rounds of peer feedback and reviews.

5. Production

After we settle down all the features and game mechanic, prioritized the importance of each 3D assets and characters, I started making 3D models and painting textures. Because of the limitation of the VR equipment, the programmer and I did several poly-count tests to get the maximum poly-count we can reach in the VR environment.

6. User Testing

We conducted user testing on volunteered older adults to test the final product. The Faculty of education from SFU was also making observation and collecting datas during the user testing process for the research.

TUTORIAL

Labyrinth is a two player multi-platform online and VR Escape Room experience created for Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University for research purpose. The objective of the project is to create a digital escape room experience, designed to engage and meet the needs of older adults through elements of real life and online escape room games and puzzles, interactive storytelling, and virtual reality.

The core of this experience is communication. In order to provide a social component to the game, we decided to create an asymmetrical collaborative multiplayer experience. This means that two players on two screens have access to different information and they both need to communicate and work together (either online or in-person) in order to get out.