As a part of our methodology, we have committed to holding at least one play testing session during each sprint. This is imperative, because we can talk circles and analyze our work all that we want, but the perspective of members of our target audience, children around fifth grade, is invaluable. This was made abundantly clear when we tested our most recent iteration of Collaboration Station on three children, siblings: Joe, 12, Myra, 9, Jim, 10.
We started the play testing session by handing the children the devices with the game on its welcome screen. We then observed their interactions with the game start up and device pairing. They struggled with this, so we took note and moved on. They played the matching game several times, and then we asked them questions about the different aspects of the game. In order to eliminate the random answers that children are prone to, most of our questions were specific yes/no questions, such as “Did you like the sound effect when you got a match?” or “Did you like being assigned a country?”
The results were rather insightful. We learned that our start game sequence isn’t intuitive for children, and so may need directions or different wording. We observed that the scenario text framing the game sets up certain expectations for the child. We said that they were cleaning up the space station; the fact that match pairs didn’t disappear or get “put away” was confusing in the context of the scenario. We learned many other things, and generated a couple new game ideas from the children’s suggestions.
Do you have any suggestions on how to perform qualitative tests with children? Let us know!
Click on the following link for Playtesting_Session_One_Documentation.
