Paper prototype

Since we had to re-do a lot of the work of the previous sessions, we are running a little behind on schedule. We started with paper-prototype tests of our application on Wednesday. We started with a prototype to test on our own. Not all popups and mouse-over effects were there, as it was just to see if we didn't forget some major functions. In the picture below, you can see how the prototype looked like. We already kept in mind some of the things we learned from the paper prototype tests of our previous concept. Users want a close-button for the menu items, and don't want to click the menu on the left. They are lost if we just give them a menu, they want close buttons. We decided having both the menus and close buttons available would be best.

Once we had a good feeling about it, we made a second prototype. This time we tested it on people sitting in the hall of the computer-science department. We noticed people didn't know where the mining button was for. They kept clicking on it, while they were already on that screen. This button remained there from the time we didn't have the close buttons. In the next prototype we will remove this button.

The users also wanted to be able to select which friends are being used to determine what articles they are mining. To achieve this, we will add an extra button in the friends list. By clicking this, a friend can be enabled or disabled.

We are now testing our new version of the paper prototype with new users and hope the interface will be better with our new improvements.

Working out our new concept

We decided to work out the idea for mining and rating news. We will first explain how this new concept will work, and then explain what we think the benefits are compared to our old concept. However, if users prefer the old concept we will go back to the previous one.

A user will have the possibility to mine freely in the underground. In this underground, he will find different minerals that represent articles. When his friends haven't rated the category of the article or the total ratings aren't positive or negative, it will be a rock. A more valuable mineral will represent an article category his friends liked. The more they liked it, the more valuable mineral will represent it. A diamond will represent the most valuable article categories. A non-valuable icon, like talc will represent an article category that was rated negatively by his friends.

The user can earn badges with the actions he does in the game. There will be badges for reading articles attached to a specific mineral. For example "diamond lover" if the user read 100 diamond articles or "persevering" if he read a lot of articles rated as talc. The user is still allowed to choose like or dislike after reading the article without consequences for the badges. The rating system is to help his friends, so the reward for pressing the right button is that the user will get more relevant news later on, depending on his actions. We will only attach badges to how often the user uses the application, not how he uses it.

Since we have a clear view of what categories of articles a group of friends like, we can create graphs to indicate the common interests of the friend group. This way a new user can find out what his friends like, just by adding them. Without even reading a single article. The graph could also show the difference between what the user likes and what his friends like, allowing him to remove friends that have totally different interests. If you just want the articles you like, just don't invite other friends.

For finding friends easily and making it easy for our application to spread, we would make this as a facebook application. This way users don't have to register and they can just select their friends in a list to play together. It is also possible to give users the option to post badges on their wall when they earned them, allowing to attract more new players in our application.

So what are the advantages of this new concept?

• The users have a clear motivation for playing the game. If they rate articles, they will get news focussed on what they like. If his friends rate a specific category, this will also give the current user more news from that category.
• The application still has badges, but now the badges also make it possible to attract new players. In the old application badges only made the current users attached to the application.
• We think the application should be simpler and the concept more clear. We dropped the highscores and the selling system, keeping the application focussed on 1 thing.
• Users can now indicate if they didn't like a specific article. This will make sure the current category will be shown less often. They won't feel we are bullying them with articles they don't like, we are just trying to learn what they like.

We will create a storyboard for this new concept in the following week and start to test it with a paper version once that is finished.

Back to the drawing board?

After the reviews we got from the paper version, we now have a better look at our concept. It seems the concept isn't very clear for the users. Not all the reviewers seem to understand the point of the game.
This leaves us with a tough choice. Do we have to keep to our current concept of mining with a tree-structure or do we have to change to yet another idea?

What are the pros and the cons of our current idea?

• We saw the tree-structure as a way to unlock better news and more refined categories later in the game. This can however also be seen as annoying the user with stuff they don't want to read in the beginning. Only later on in the game they will be able to get the refined news they are looking for. The user will never get there, as we scare them away in the beginning of the game. For us it was clear that the user can work towards the news he likes, but apparently not all users see it this way.
• We had money in the game, but the money had no use except the highscores. This was very confusing for the users, because they expect to be able to buy something with the money.
• It seems that the rollovers were not clear enough in our paper version. Users got lost in the UI and didn't know what to do, because the information was in the rollovers. Some users also didn't know how to get out of certain menus, as there was no cross to close it. Both these things can be related to the fact that it is only a paper version, where a rollover is hard to simulate and that a paper isn't always the same as a window. We don't know this for sure, the only way to find out is by testing it in a real version. 

If we want to continue with our current idea, we should find solutions for these problems.
Now, why would we stick to our current concept?

• Some of the test-users liked the concept, even though it can use some refinement.
• We already worked out this concept. Although this should not make our decision, unwillingly it will play a role.
• The idea of badges and highscores will make the players come back to our application.

What next?

One of our test subjects (E.D.) suggested to give the articles a value based on the opinions of friends on that article. In this vision, you will rate articles which will increase their value. This could be globally or for your friends. We should decide what the meaning of the depth is. This could be refinement of categories, value of the articles found or even nothing. We had the feeling we did this, but apparently it wasn't clear enough.

We thought we could give more articles of a specific category based on what the user and his friends liked. So every category starts with the same likelihood to be digged at the surface, but the deeper you mine, the more you get articles that match the interests of your friend group. You are also able to go back up to get some more varied news. If you want to read something totally unrelated to what your friends like, you won't find it if you mine too deep. However, articles that match the interests of your friends will be worth more. To keep this system working, a user would be obligated to press like or dislike. That way no news stays unrated.

Similar to this idea, and merged with an idea of E.D., we can make a user walk around underground, indicating where articles are. These articles would be represented by mud, rocks, diamonds,... The value of the mineral indicates how much the article was rated by the friends of the user. If it receives a negative rating, its mud, a neutral or no rating makes it a stone and a positive rating makes it gold or diamonds. If a user mines a rock, and finds it iteresting he gives it a good rating and the article raises in value. If afterwards the value rises, the user gets extra points. If however others dislike it and the value decreases, the user that gave it a good rating gets penalized. In this solution the mining depth would have no use or value. The value will depend on the icon representing the article.

The problem with these new ideas is that we don't know if they will solve the problems we have with our current design. It could be that our users think they are even worse than our original idea.

We are leaning towards the last idea we described here. We will work this out in more detail and try if users prefer the paper version of that idea. Depending on the comments we get from the users, we will decide with what idea we should continue. We won't make a final decision at this moment.

Any thoughts on the new concept we chose to work out, the other concepts we described or new concepts are welcome.

Refining our idea

Because of the negative comments on the auction system, we decided to get rid of the auction system.

We don't want to offer the application as just a click game where the news is used as in-game currency. This is why we thought of a new feature for the application.

When a user mines an article, he will get the choice of 3 possible buyers. One of them will be related to the article and the other two will just be random people. Only the person related to the article will offer a lot of money for the article, while others will offer almost nothing. There would then be a highscore of the players with the most amount of money. Those who sell the articles to the correct persons will get money faster. This way there is a reason for actually reading the articles. To implement this, we can use opencalais or something similar to get names out of the articles.

Now that we have a final concept, we will explain everything in more detail with the help of a storyboard.

Storyboard

Again the application starts with some kind of start screen.

The user start with no depth and no money in the dig tab.

All bullets in the picture are clickable.

When going over a certain bullet, a roll over menu is shown.

This menu indicates which type of article will be mined and from which newspaper.

Also an indication of progress is given.

Every time the user clicks on the "Random Story" bullet, a random new story article will be shown. More about this in just a few moments.

When a certain node is fully dug out, the user will be able to go to that point.

Also new categories will be available. New categories are refinements of the earlier category or random articles from a total new newspaper.

Earlier bullets will still be available to dig by going to that point and clicking on it.

The screen will always be centered on the user.

When the user goes deeper he will discover new layers with more interesting contents.

When a user has dug up an article, he will be able to see the abstract of the article.

When interested, he will be able to read the entire article by clicking on the read more button.

To proceed, the user has to sell the article to a random character.

1 character will reward the user generously. The other two will give consolation credits.

In this way, we do not force the user to read the article, but it is more advantageous if he would.

Highscores!

Achievements, trophies, badges, ...

Some kind of special reward for players that fulfill a certain requirement.

Users can invite friends and watch their progress, badges and trophies.

Why do we want to make this application?
Our goal is to get younger people in touch with news. Most kids and teens aren't interested in the news. By adding a playful element to the news, they might read more of the news and get interested in it. They will learn while playing the game.
How will we achieve our goals?

• We will add a competitive element to make sure users keep playing the game. The competitive element will consist of badges that users can show to others and two kinds of highscores: mining depth and coins gathered.
• We will make sure that users read the news by rewarding them for reading it. When they sell the article to the correct person, they get more money.

Similar existing applications
We found a related idea about social news gaming. http://www.newsgaming.de/2010/10/a-social-news-game/

Their concept is very similar to ours. They also want a rating system with badges and stress the competitive element while retaining the social news aspect.

They do have some variations. They let the users be reporters, while we let them be miners. They are also talking about selling things to their users and companies, while ours will be free.

They say they will be the first app in this genre. Our goal is now to try to beat them by finishing our application before them.

What we learned from the reactions

After reading all the comments on our concept, we learned that the connection between the data miner and its auction house is not clear enough.
Originally we only had the dataminer, but this concept on its own can not make users come back. Once they have mined all corridors, they will just quit playing. This is why we wanted to add some kind of living economy system. The most basic one seemed to be an auction house, as this is used in most multiplayer games and the users will be familiar with the concept.
It is true that the link between the mining and the auction system is rather vague, but we couldn't find any economy system with a better link to the dataminer. This leaves us with three options.

• We could just drop the auction system, but that would cause problems with players leaving the game due to a lack of content. This would also reduce the value of the news to nothing. It would just be a replacement of coins.
• We could replace the auction system with an other type of economy. Unfortunately we don't really have good ideas of what could come instead. The economy has to be related to the value of the news in the articles, to make sure users also read the articles. We don't want to have articles just as a replacement of coins.
• We could further explain the link between the two and keep the concept as it is, while just explaining why it is this way. In this system the users indicate how much some news is worth to them by setting a price for it in the auction house, meaning they have read the articles.

Choosing between these three options is hard, as none of them is an optimal solution. 

Once we have chosen what we will do, we will work out the concept in more detail, adding a storyboard for further explanation.

Auction system for DataMiner

We have finalized the concept of our dataminer game. The software would have two main parts:

• mining for new articles
• an auction house system to buy, sell and speculate on articles.

There will be 3 types of highscores:

1. A highscore based on how much corridors the user has already mined
2. A highscore based on the total cash of the user
3. A highscore based on the value of the users inventory. Each article has a recycling-value and the total value of the inventory is the combined value of all the articles in the inventory.

To make the dataminer more focussed on the articles, we would add a auction system to the program. This will allow users to buy and sell the articles they mined. They can speculate on how much an article will be worth in the future. This creates an economy within the game, partially dependent on the base values of the articles, and partially created by how much an article is worth to the users.

The mining part of the game will generate the articles to keep the economy alive. The user starts by mining at the surface. He will get articles from all categories. When mined deep enough, he can choose in which direction to mine. Depending on the direction, he will get articles from other categories. The articles are in a tree-structure, and the further the user has mined in a certain direction, the more he can refine his search for articles. If there is a world-cup football, a user will probably want to find articles in the category sport-football, since those will be worth more at that time. This makes users follow the news, to know which articles they have to look for, further increasing the purpose of the game.

Dataminer

We will probably develop the dataminer application, unless we get enough arguments to go for the article rating system from the other groups.

What users will use this application?

• users that just want to play a game and gain levels
• users that want to read random articles of todays news in a certain genre.

We want to give the users the feeling that they are booking progress in the reading of newspapers. This is why we keep track of their progress.Some options are:

• some kind of monetary value gained while mining
• a level of a player, indicating its strength
• how deep the player can mine, expressed in meters
• the combined length of all shafts a player has mined

For each article a user mines, this indication will rise. This way it is also possible to make users compete against each other with some kind of highscore.

At specific levels, a user will gain bonuses, like being allowed to get articles from other newspapers, refine the genre the articles come from,...

When the user mines an article, he gets the choice to keep it in his backpack for later reading or reading it now and throw it away. The size of the backpack is fixed. If the backpack is full, the user has to delete some articles if he wants to keep the newly archived article.

The concept of this application is to make younger people more interested in the news, in a playful way. This means our testing public will be restricted to mostly children and adolescents. Unfortunately we won't be able to do the mom-test, but will replace it with the baby-brother-test.

The highscores will allow us to gather more people, because current players will invite their friends to beat them and they will keep playing, because people always want to beat others.