“Helpful” Heuristics

At a glance

  • The design team at Dassault Systemes – Solidworks, conducted an in-person design summit so that all the team members across the globe meet each other.
  • To help identify individual strengths and ways to collaborate, the whole design team was split into smaller sub-teams and each sub-team was asked to design an interactive game related to UX in 5 days.
  • The sub-team I was a part of, developed a card game called “Helpful” Heuristics, a game to test the knowledge and application of UX methods in tricky situations.
  • We leveraged CAD modeling, laser cutting, and 3D printing to build our own components.

Problem Statement

Design an interactive physical game that relates to User Experience Design.

Background and my role in the project

With around 25 team members spread across Waltham, Providence, Wisconsin in the United States, Cambridge in the U.K., and Pune in India, the UX design team of Solidworks doesn’t get an opportunity to meet each other in person often. Thus, a design summit is conducted every year where team building activities are included to foster collaboration among team members. One such activity was the design jam.

I was part of a team that included 3 other designers and we collaboratively built “Helpful” heuristics.

Time period: Five days
Team size: Four
Software used: Adobe XD and Illustrator, Mural boards, and an upcoming Solidworks product
Tools used: Laser cutter, Vinyl Cutter, 3D printer

Approach

Brainstorming

  • We started with a brain dump of our ideas on a Mural whiteboard. The mind map shows a glimpse of the ideas explored.
  • We discussed the explorations in-person to focus on high-level strategies.
  • To make sure that we finish the game within the specified deadline of five days, we decided to draw inspiration from other existing games.
  • To keep the idea feasible within the given timeframe, we decided to use the machines at our disposal in the 3D experience lab at Dassault Systemes.

Refining

  • After two rounds of exploration, we decided to go ahead with the perspective of UX practitioners to play the game because we could relate to it well and we need not conduct extensive exploratory research. 
  • The basic idea – Which design or research method should a UX practitioner use in a particular situation?
  • Drawing inspiration from “Story Cubes”, a dice game, the situation will be created using a set of three dice.
  • One of the dice will decide the type of user and another will decide the type of project
  • The third dice will include an element of surprise which will make the problem statement tricky.
  • Drawing inspiration from the game “Cards Against Humanity”, this game revolves around the convincing skills of a UX practitioner to implement a solution i.e. specific research/design method.
  • The solutions are written on cards. There are 21 best practice solutions.
  • To include an element of luck, we included 9 wildcards that could get the player out of some tricky situations.
  • To instill the feeling of success in every round we included coins as a sign of victory in every round.

Implementation

We modelled the three dice using an upcoming Solidworks Product in closed beta. The STL file created was used to create a gcode and then sent to the 3D printer.

The coins were laser cut from a plywood plank. A color coded Adobe illustrator file guided the laser cutter.

About the game

Components

Number of players:  3-8

Playing Pieces:

  • 100 “Helpful” Heuristic Coins
  • 30 Best Practice Cards 
  • 3 Scenario Dice

Rules

  1. Getting started
    • Shuffle all the best practice cards and wildcards in the deck and distribute it evenly among participants.
    • Distribute the “Helpful” Heuristic coins among all the players.
    • Choose a Project Lead. This role changes in a clockwise fashion among the players.
  2. Rolling the dice
    • The Project Lead roles the dice to reveal the project scenario. 
    • User, Project and Surprise dice lead to the scenario.
  3. Proposing a solution
    • Each of the other team members in turn selects a card from their hand and pitches the idea to the Project Lead. 
    • The goal is to convince the Project Lead.
  4. Winning the Round
    • The Project Lead selects the idea they like the best and gives a “Helpful” Heuristic coin to the winning team member.
    • The player to the left becomes the new Project Lead.
    • The player with the most “Helpful” Heuristic coins at the end of the game wins!

Other explorations

  • Exploration B: The team members present their solution by drawing their best cards in a closed fashion into a pile. Thus there is no convincing required and the project lead selects the best solution only by reading the cards. 
  • Exploration C: All the players including the project lead propose their individual solution and every team member should reward any other member with a coin if they are convinced with the explanation.

Testing

Testing
  • We tested the game through auto-ethnography where we observed ourselves play.
  • We evaluated different rule exploration and decided on our first exploration because it had the element of surprise, and also had a competitive nature compared to the others keeping the fundamental goal of educating ourselves and convincing others in context.

Result

We presented our game in the design jam and received appreciation. My best highlight of the presentation was that every member in the room connected the game to their daily lives as UX practitioners and all of them laughed out loud while looking at the surprise elements in the game.