DECO2300 Video Prototype User Evaluation

After showing my Minestructor kickstarter video to a class of roughly 20 design students, I approached 8 of them and asked them a series of questions regarding it. The questions are listed below.

1. Do you understand the objective of the game
2. Do you understand the rules of the game
3. What games do you think this is similar to
4. How interested would you be in playing this game

Interestingly enough, I assumed that almost every participant in my survey would immediately notice the similarity between my idea and minesweeper. I was shocked to find out that a significant proportion of students in the class had never played minesweeper. This was an important factor to consider as every student who had admitted playing minesweeper in the past understood the objectives and rules with crystal clarity and were able to parrot them back to me. The students who had not played minesweeper however only had a vague understanding of the rules. There is the obvious case of a language barrier in determining how much misunderstanding was due to my lack of communication and of the cases and sentence structure variance between English and Mandarin. 

In regards to this design ideas similarity to minesweeper, students that had never played minesweeper before had difficulty relating the two together, though some noticed the similarities since they had investigated the game for the purpose of our assignment. However, I found that every user that had played minesweeper in the past immediately outlined similarities between the 2 games, a couple even mentioned obstruction.

Many users telegraphed some degree of interest in playing the game, particularly due to the simple concept, small learning curve and somewhat ambitious nature of the game. I believe I will have to take further steps to clarify the rules of the game to participants in the future, though as it appears now, my design concept satisfies most of my expectations.