MUSE

OVERVIEW

Odyssey is an immersive scavenger hunt experience that helps people who are new to a city learn more about the place, visit new sites, and gain confidence in a new environment

Inspired by popular games such as Pokémon Go, Nudge, and SuperBetter, Odyssey employs a variety of persuasive techniques like obfuscation (embedded design) and self affirmation techniques, to persuade people who are new to a place to step out of their comfort zone and explore their new city. Our goal is to reduce the time for acclimation and help boost confidence among people with this game!

PERSUASIVE DESIGN TECHNIQUES USED:

Here’s a sneak peek of the project in our short video (and spot me too :))

DESIGN CHALLENGE

The project goal was to design an interactive experience aimed to facilitate positive transformations in users, whether through mindset shifts, habit adoption, or behavior change, ultimately benefiting both individuals and society informed by persuasive design techniques.

We started by choosing our target audience first 

My team and I were deeply interested in exploring the problem space relating to international students as we all were international students from countries around the world. Often when you come to a new place, students felt lonely and lacked the sense of belonging. Building on this, we were aiming to increase the feeling of safety, confidence and sense of belonging in this audience and employ persuasive design techniques to do so!

BACKGROUND RESEARCH

We initially focused specifically on international students who were new to the country, to help them acclimate and explore their surroundings

Our goal was to create a persuasive intervention would be used to persuade our target audience to go outside of their comfort zone and form new and unique connections, particularly with the local community

Hence we focused our research around this. Next few weeks we spent on understanding this problem space, looking for similar studies, previous attempts made to mitigate this and most importantly, talking to our target audience.

 Identifying opportunities

Our team conducted 4 focus group sessions with a total of 12 participants. All participants were international students from different countries who recently entered a new place or had a prior experience of doing so. We conducted an activity where we provided participants with 100 metaphors and ask them choose ones that they associated with the concepts of:
‍
1. New Places
2. Sense of Belonging
3. Community
4. Culture
5. Family & Friends

Moments from our focus groups

Metaphors chosen by one of the participants

This activity helped us step into the shoes of our target audience, understand the challenges they face when moving to a new city and the activities that make them feel a sense of belonging.

 Understanding through the eyes of experts

We met with 4 experts who had varying levels of expertise and perspectives on the topic of community building and acclimatization for international graduate students.

Experts agreed that it's important to find the right mix of support and freedom. This way, people can connect with others while still feeling like they have control over their own choices. Moreover, experts emphasized the importance of multi-modal activations to keep students updated amidst their busy schedules. Finally, co-creation emerged as a powerful strategy, empowering students to lead community-building efforts.

 Literature review

To understand the space even further, we dove deep into 11 research papers exploring their acclimation process and existing support efforts. We cast our net wider and investigated popular games like Pokémon Go, Nudge, and Super Better, seeking inspiration from their methods to fuel the spirit of exploration and discovery in our own project.

FULL LITERATURE REVIEW

INSIGHTS

Based on our combination of research methods, we were able to synthesize valuable insights that illuminate key opportunities and strategies to support the acclimatization of international students.

Acclimation to a place consists of many factors

Between landing in a new place and starting to get a feeling of belonging, there are many key aspects involved such as time, self-acceptance, letting go of preconceived notions and using public transportation to name a few.
‍

“When I take my family and friends around the city, the fact that I know exactly where to go and can take the bus makes me feel a sense of belonging.”
- Focus Group Participant

Learning small things about a place
‍

Participants started to feel a greater sense of belonging when they began to understand the nuances that are obvious to the locals but not to them. Knowing things that a small group of people know makes you feel like you belong to the place
‍

“I used to take for granted these small things that I knew about my city. There were specific things that were hard to learn about that I already knew.”
- Focus Group Participant

Balancing structure and independence

Participants need to have some structure to foster connections but with enough agency so that they can choose to take ownership at their own will. Successful interventions will also create hooks for people to begin communications without feeling surveilled and provide opportunities for larger and smaller group formations.
‍

“Interventions need to be authentic and recognize when people are being engaged and empowered and enable them to make the choices to build it further”
- Expert Interview

Co-creation in community building

Successful interventions facilitate a sense of belonging and community formation while empowering people within the community to lead efforts. What then needs to follow are persistence and a lack of negative experiences. Persistence to promote consistency and familiarity in people’s lives while making sure that these experiences are positive enough that it enables people to be more willing and open to forming a sense of belonging.

“I created the facebook group for the students, they then took ownership and continued the efforts”.
- Expert Interview

BRAINSTORMING

With a clear direction in mind, it was time to put our divergent-thinking caps on!

Aside from the well-known Crazy 8s and brainstorming sessions, we employed the 'The Thing from the Future' technique to generate more innovative ideas and divergent thinking to encourage fresh ideas. Each of our team members generated 10-12 ideas inspired by the brainstorming sessions. These concepts focused on encouraging target users to move beyond their comfort zones and gain self-confidence by being more familiar with the city's intricacies, transportation, and cultural and social aspects. Following that, we tried to group common idea themes to move a step closer to our intervention.

My Ideas from Brainstorming

Group Affinity Diagramming

From this session, we realized that we were leaning towards a more ‘exploration’ vibe. We further decided to narrow down and choose scavenger hunt and crowdsourcing ideas to move ahead with as our main ideas.

Feedback

“For idea 1, maybe provide context into the significance (if any) of having them go to a specific place”

“I wonder if you could explore relating the intervention to transport? Like maybe one of the challenges is learning how to use the bus to get there. Could this be something that you could also use with a friend? Could you connect with others also completing the challenges?”

“How could users remember to find items from their scavenger hunt when they’re not in the app? Or is this meant to only happen when users are already in the app? What do the points count towards, and how does this motivate users?”

PHYSICAL PROTOTYPING

Wizard of Oz-ing scavenger hunt

Now that we established who our intended user group was as well as idea with which we planned to proceed, it was time to put our concepts and various persuasive techniques to the test to bring about change in these people who had just moved to a new city. We used the 'Wizard of Oz' technique to test the following:

Is our strategy of obscuring the goal working? Are users motivated enough to step out of their comfort zones?

Is priming users with words like "wonder, friend, etc." beneficial to the purpose of acclimatization?

Do people prefer to create fresh connections naturally, or do they want the intervention to assist them make new friends?

For this prototype, we told our participants it was an experiential game while obscuring its true purpose. We asked them to go to a coffee shop (we chose coffee shops where they had never been before to encourage them to visit new places). When they arrived, they had to solve the challenge shown below to unlock the token and receive a free coffee from the cafe.

To test the efficiency of priming, we designed two types of puzzles. We primed one group of users with crossword puzzles containing terms such as "Friend, Curiosity, Wonder, etc."

Primed version

Unprimed version

Testing & Learnings

Artifacts from Wizard of Oz

Over the span of 2 weeks we tested our prototype with 6 participants and these were our preliminary insights:



Participants expressed a desire for a more social experience

Participants said they would be more comfortable doing this with friends, especially for the first few rounds. Overtime, they felt that they would develop the confidence to go alone.



It’s was more about the journey, not only the destination

The transit experience in a crowded bus took away from the experience. Providing more engagement or activities to participants as they are in transit could provide a more immersive experience.



We found an opportunity to use more obfuscation

A design opportunity could be to include a narrative storyline, perhaps related to the history and folklore of the city, to make the scavenger hunt more interesting and motivating for users to complete.



We could not get any conclusive effect of priming on participants

It was difficult to determine effect of priming, mostly because each participant started at a different baseline of introversion/extroversion, plus our sample size was very small to measure the effectiveness of the priming activity.

We saw major improvements in the second round of prototyping!

1. Narrative storyline led to greater engagement

Participants were extremely excited after completing the scavenger hunt in this round as compared to Round 1. They reported that the anticipation of solving clues and going to different locations made them feel adventurous and “like they were in a movie”. Some even found themselves interacting with strangers to figure out answers to some of the clues.

2. Priming & Self-Affirmation via values promoted exploration

FEEDBACK FROM OUR PARTICIPANTS:

“The art heist felt like I was in a movie; it felt adventurous.”

“It got me outside of my comfort zone... I had never visited these places before.”

“I loved discussing clues with my partner. This is the first time we’ve bonded 1-1.”

“We didn’t always know where we were going but that made it exciting!”

HI-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE

Since we had an aspect of an immersive storyline, we wanted to keep a history and story-like vibe to our design. The premise of the ‘Great Art Heist Hunt’ is an immersive storyline: an iconic Andy Warhol painting has been stolen and replaced with a blank canvas. Somewhere in the vibrant streets of Pittsburgh, parts of the stolen masterpiece have been hidden and the thief has left a series of clues that will guide players through Pittsburgh’s historical and cultural landmarks. Players’ mission is to decipher the clues, find the missing pieces and bring back Warhol's masterpiece to its rightful place.

FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS



Evaluating Confidence and Exploration Over Time

I would have loved to conduct a longer-term user test with a larger participant pool . This would have allowed us to evaluate the design's impact on confidence building and exploration habits over time.



Exploring Augmented Reality integration

Beyond the core design, I was particularly interested in exploring AR integration in our hints. Implementing and testing this feature with users would have been a valuable learning experience.



Expanding Various Pittsburgh Storylines

While this project provided a solid foundation, I would’ve loved to delve deeper and create additional hunt storylines that truly capture the essence of Pittsburgh
‍

LEARNINGS & TAKEAWAYS

The Impact of Persuasive Design
‍
My biggest learning from this project was how to use persuasive design strategies to influence human behavior. Along with the embedded design and self-affirmation techniques, I also studied biases, cognitive dissonance theory, social cognition theories etc. and their applications. The project gave me confidence in applying these strategies in my future designs!

Going beyond the traditional design methods
‍
In this class, we used innovative ideation techniques like 'Thing From the Future' and 'Tarot Cards of Tech', which included cards like 'the forgotten', that helped us make a pivotal decision in this project to not limit this game to international students but to anyone new to the area.I'm eager to integrate these approaches into future projects.

The team :)

With Professor Kauffman