I had Dhabia, Nick and Pangna user test my project. I think that the key takeaways that I got were the following:
- Adding signifiers or instructions of some sorts so users would know when to pet the animal or harvest resources and how they would do this.
- Featuring my (somewhat vague) instructions in a more prominent location on the screen.
- Fixing boundary issues between the player and the resources and animals.
- Some issues with the touch sensor, thinking of possibly making the hit location of the “hammer” smaller.
I think that the most important thing that can contribute to user experience is my use of instructions. Furthermore, people did not engage with the game as I thought they would. I wanted the users to pet the animals and then harvest the resources at each level, to fully see how the environment changes throughout the game, however, they often just wanted to complete the game as fast as they could.
User testing was extremely useful because a lot of what I have been doing for the past few days has become very narrow. I think it has been really hard to step out of my biases, my experiences and my intentions for the game that I neglected instructions and very basic things. I am lucky because there is very little that I have to do for the project to be complete by Thursday so I can really focus on fine-tuning the little things before the show.
Here are the videos of their user testing: