Here in Texas Travel Troupe, we’re almost at the homestretch of our journey to compile user data for Texas Highways’ “Choose Your Own Adventure” travel game. To solve our primary design question – How might we help connect Texas Highways readers with road trips and destinations that uniquely interest them? – we gained inspiration through researching products both in the space and analogous to our project realm and ideated potential prototypes. Now, we’ve built iterations of those prototypes.
Influenced by human-centered design, we first distributed a survey to Texas Highways stakeholders to learn about their travel habits and goals. We asked questions such as “When do you travel the most?” and “What sort of destination are you seeking?” with multiple choice answer options. These 73 initial responses provided a launching point for the questions in our prototypes.
Our first prototype was a simple binary quiz intended to test out our first draft of questions. We wanted to learn if people liked the amount of questions asked or wanted more or less, if people liked the questions asked and if they thought their given destination matched their responses. During a Zoom focus group with stakeholders, we administered the quiz, received feedback through a Google form and accepted verbal feedback. Our main takeaways were that people wanted to answer more questions to get a more customized destination. This was surprising to us because we had thought that people would want to answer the least amount of questions possible. Another aspect we learned was that we should tailor future questions based on the participant’s answers, rather than asking everyone the same questions.
Implementing user feedback from our first prototype, we created our second prototype: a Google form with expanded questions and destination options. We also added questions that were dependent on respondents’ previous answers. Once again, we held a Zoom focus group with stakeholders to administer the quiz and receive feedback verbally and through a Google form. Our feedback was largely positive: users stated that the second prototype was much more developed than the first prototype. Users also recommended that the questions be weighted differently to achieve a complex point system that would then properly provide a more tailored final product.
An “aha moment” occurred for us while ideating our first prototype. We’d spent the past week fighting with post-its to try and create a nearly fully functional game with all 13 destinations provided by Texas Highways, weighted answers and all. But after Texas Highways advised us to narrow our focus to just the questions in the game, we created a working deliverable very quickly.
Minutes before our second focus group, we had no RSVPs. Worried that we would not have users to test our prototype, we began brainstorming alternative methods. Fortunately, eight people joined our Zoom, so we were able to overcome our obstacle. We also shifted the focus of our second Zoom meeting towards written feedback rather than verbal feedback to allow users the time and space to think through their reactions to our prototype.
We can’t wait to see our game come to life, and we hope you enjoyed the ride!
Texas Travel Troupe holds a second Zoom focus group.