My team, Quaranteam aka QT, participated in an Activision x Adobe Jam geared towards college students. As our first competition together, we won 2nd place out of 300 other teams.
TDLR: During this competition, I did research focusing on parent’s concerns with children gaming and did 1/3 of the designs of the application. In addition, I created 90% of the interaction designs throughout the app connecting each screen.
Interaction Designer, Visual Designer
2 Designers: Alicia Leung, Vicky Feng
Adobe XD
2 Days | Jun 2020
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Made by the Talented Vicky Feng!
As the Covid-19 crisis continues to persist, many are spending their free time indoors gaming. With quarantine in place, many people use these games as a way to ease their loneliness and stay connected. Our task was to create a third-party mobile app that helps a specific age demographic to discover new games based on personal preferences.
We gravitated to young kids because we immediately felt inspired by games of our youth like Club Penguin and Neopets. These games and many others helped us socialize and become invested as social gamers today. With our target users down, we honed in on our challenge.
How might we encourage young kids to discover games and foster connections while playing them?
Our social gaming application Animal Scouts, combats this issue by enticing kids to play new games and share their discoveries with their friends, furthering their achievements as an animal scout!
Go To PrototypeIn my research, I interviewed my nephew about his feeling with restricted interaction with their friends. In addition, I looked up articles about quarantine gaming for kids. After we came back together to talk about our research, we found the following key takeaways:
Kids are anxious in this epidemic because there is a lack of control in their lives — progressing in games helps alleviate stress.
Gaming provides an outlet where people can communicate without meeting physically.
Playing as various characters give a sense of temporary escapism while confined in their homes.
Make their own character and dress them up
Increase the pursuit of finding new ones by exploration of new games
Collaborate, compete, and hangout with friends
Find games that are suitable depending on their age in a fun way
Once we created our design goals, we drew inspiration from trading card games like Yugioh and Pokemon. Gamifying trading and a rewards system was key to this feature list.
Based on the feature list, we created the Information Architecture to understand how the app connects to each other.
We split up the navigation tabs, but collectively worked on the onboarding and random boards. I was in charge of the sticker collection, trading, and shopping feature. I also worked on 90% of the interaction designs for transitions and animations.
Play new games by yourself or with friends. Unlock in-app rewards to customize your avatar
Customize your avatar with unique gear and use points from playing games to buy new attire
Collect stickers and trade them with friends for more points
Find new friends and see their activity. ~Maybe ask them to join in on the fun!
I’m thrilled to say that our design won 2nd place out of 300 other teams in the design jam. My team designed for ~20 hours during the weekend and it was exhilarating to the concept come to life in a short time period. I really liked the workflow and division of our work. We made small goals for ourselves each day to increase efficiency and productivity.
In this intense environment, I learned that creating quality work in a short amount of time is extremely hard, but not impossible. Producing an inspirational board and creating a fun design environment helped me stay motivated in the short weekend. Overall, I am very proud of the work we have done and I’m still very ecstatic that our concept was placed in the top 3.