Design Challenge
How can we design an accessibly friendly and inclusive game for a child who lives with multiple disabilities?
We began by analyzing articles, journals and development logs all pertaining to the design of accessibly friendly games. This research helped us create design pillars that would serve as the foundation to our end-product.
Design Pillars
Motor
Visual
Cognitive
Communication
Motor
Children with a deficit for motor movement may struggle to interact with the objects. Pieces on the board need to be large enough to grip and light enough to move.
Visual
Players who suffer from colour blindness will have difficulty understanding the board visually. The game should not be text heavy or filled with disruptive colours.
Cognitive
The game needs to gently test the player's cognitive abilities with respect to memory, attention, problem solving, and strategy.
Communication
Being mindful of communicative challenges such as soft speech, slow speech and use of communication devices are necessary when designing the game. We want players to interact with one another while feeling comfortable,
We also began brainstorming on a whiteboard to visualize our rough ideas and gain a better understanding of the user and the design challenge.
As a team, we then combined our findings from the analyzed research and directed our attention towards a user persona. This became our guide for what specific challenges we want to focus on and how we'd create solutions for them.
Who Is Our User?
We explored several variations of games that prioritized simplicity and ease of use. After multiple iterations, we assembled a rough rule-set that closely followed our design pillars and best represented the battles that Sam faces.
Sam Bennet
Shy in Nature
About
Condition(s): Brain Injury
Limited Dexterity
Colour Blindness
Traits
Challenges
Sam has limited motor function in her hands which hinders her from grabbing/ squeezing objects
She also has monochromatic vision (total colour blindness)
She is unable to make quick decisions
Motivations
Needs
Persona of Sam
Playtesting
With a rough idea of our game in mind, we created a quick paper prototype for the purpose of playtesting. This initial playtest allowed us to generate feedback for our game. Playing it rather than talking about it revealed areas for iteration and opportunities for new ideas worth exploring that weren't clear when simply discussing it.
Playtesting Rules | Phase 1
Style Guide
Color Scheme
Base &
Monochromatic
Typography
Adobe Calson
Shapes
Designing the Pieces
We've kept our target user as the center piece to our design thus far and we needed our game piece to reflect that. We began exploring methods for how we could interact with the board and it's pieces in a comfortable way. We also wanted the pieces to be informative, meaning they would reinforce the rules and overall design of the game.
I sketched out some mock-ups for the pieces while remaining mindful of the constraints:
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Squeezing, pinching and grabbing motions cannot be used.
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Objects can be slid, rolled, knocked over.
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Keep it simple; complexities may confuse the user.
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Our board requires a lot of these pieces so they need to be easy to construct.
Physical Prototype Ideation
After some feedback from professors, we decided that one of the initial designs of the product proved to be the best option. This was due to the simplicity of the design. Players may actually have an easier time interacting with this design compared to the more complex iterations. It was also much easier to construct!
Final Physical Prototype
Final Result!
Djankies was selected by judges from the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital!
Reflection