Hello everyone out there! I’m Gary Thomson, one of the artists working on eeGeo’s shiny new checkin application ‘VenYou’, which is currently available for download from the Android market. I thought I’d let you in on how our design process works by discussing how we came to the final design of our guide in VenYou, ‘Chloe’

In the Beginning

At the start of the project we decided “Let’s make an app that’s fun and friendly”, so one of the first things I was tasked with doing was creating a character to act as a guide that would take you by the hand and help you through the various screens.

We decided to call her Chloe, and originally we designed her thinking our target audience would be somewhere in the 35+ female bracket. We wanted someone who looked pleasant, friendly and welcoming, so our first attempt looked like…

After we gathered some more data for VenYou we realised that our target audience was actually more along the lines of the 18 – 25 year old male…oops, we got that one wrong then. Back to the drawing board!

We decided to make the new Chloe look more ‘funky’ and ‘now’, but still have that fun and friendly edge that characterised our game. We shortened her hair (a lot), and changed the art style to look more contemporary, brightening the colours along the way.

…looking better, but still not quite right.

We decided to try a lot of various hair shapes and colours, clothing types and accessories to see what suited our new Chloe best. It’s amazing how different someone can look with just a slight tweak to the hair shape, a minor adjustment to the colour, so we created a sheet with as many possible variations of Chloe that we could think of.

Finally (after some more slight changes) we made a call on how our final Chloe should look.

We’re happy with her, what do you think? Would you have chosen this one from the character sheet above?

You can let us know by either leaving a comment at the end of this post

or respond to @VenYouApp on Twitter

or even send an e mail directly to us at venyou.feedback@eegeo.com

Here on the VenYou team, if we have just one problem, it’s that we’re not perfect.  We wish we were, we sometimes like to think we are, but it’s just not the case.  The issue is that we think we are, and that causes all sorts of problems, these include:

• Thinking our app is easy to use
• Thinking that people want to use our app
• Thinking that our app is the greatest thing ever

Of course, these are never the case for any project, no matter how much we like to think they’re true.

Because of these, we will happily just sit down and keep working on VenYou until we’re blue in the face, but at the end of it we won’t have something that any of you would want to use, just things that we would want instead, with all sorts of issues that we’ve simply learned to live with.

How we solve it

It turns out that the best way to solve this problem is to simply give the application to users, so we did!  UserTesting.com does the very thing we want to do (no, we’re not being paid to mention them).  It takes our application and gives it to people to test.  We then receive a video of them using it, and we can see all the places where the user tripped up in trying to do the very things we take for granted in the office.  We can also see what a user simply EXPECTS to be able to do, and how we differ from that expectation.

Here’s one of the videos from last week, you can see the kinds of problems this user had:

What we learned

What we learned from the videos (not just the above one) was the following:

Good:

• Users were easily able to check into locations in their vicinity
• Users understood what every button was supposed to do before using it

Bad:

• We were not giving enough feedback to users when something happened, they were never sure if anything was working.
• Users did not understand the XP and Energy system without overt text stating what they are.
• If something wasn’t working, the user wasn’t given feedback then either.  For example, on login failures.
• Users appeared surprised when they received level-up popups, they didn’t fully understand why they levelled up
• We had a number of unexpected crashes that did not occur with the in-house hardware we had.
• Even user tests require iteration.  Users would just do what they were told and would not always give perfect feedback.   We found we had to occasionally ask what the user was thinking.
• Users don’t understand the idea of levelling up a building as well as a user yet

What we are doing next

Early on, the main problem we had with how a user interacts with VenYou was them simply not understanding what certain parts of the UI were, so we worked to make the application a lot clearer by simply describing what each piece of the screen is.  We’re still not done, and we’ll be making the app a lot clearer in the coming days.

We have put more feedback into the app when a user interacts with buttons.  We previously has no pressed on buttons, and users were seen to tap buttons multiple times, unsure if they had clicked on them.  Now there is a pressed state on most, if not all buttons.

Users appear to be unaware of how to accumulate additional energy for checking into locations.  This is something we are looking into making more apparent.  We will also be animating XP gained on checkins in the next few weeks, to make it very clear that checking in is what causes the user to level up.

How you can help

We know we’ve got a long way to go, and we’re grateful that you’ve stuck with us so far.  We’re looking to make the application better for everyone to use, so if you have any feedback for us, via text or video, we would ask that you send it to us.  There is a comment section in this post, or you could send it directly to us at venyou.feedback@eegeo.com.

We look forward to hearing from you, and hope that you enjoyed learning about how we work.

Whatever next?

We’ve only just scratched the surface of what we want to do with VenYou.  Over the coming weeks we might give clues as to where this will eventually lead.  I suppose you’re going to have to stick around and find out, won’t you?

“Hello, we’re eeGeo!”

See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?  Now maybe you’re wondering what we do.  Well, I suppose I should tell you that, too:

“Hello, we’re eeGeo and we turn the real world into games!”

That’s better.

Welcome to our temporary home while we build a bigger, better website experience! I’m Ross Mills, one of the developers here at eeGeo, and I wanted to introduce our company. We’re a group of both casual and hardcore games industry veterans who have come together under a common vision.  We believe there is more to social games than harvesting crops and bothering your friends.  We know that we can provide a more real and actively social experience than what is usually seen with “social games”. Finally, we believe we can change the face of social gaming forever.  What do we mean by that?  Well, that’s a question for another post.

In the following months we’ll be posting about what it’s like to work for a startup, some of our lessons learned, and about the technical and social space that makes up our corner of the Internet.  We hope this excites you and that you’ll stick around to read a little of what we have to say.  And when we’re ready to talk about our projects, rest assured we’ll be waving the banners from the rooftops.

Until then, if you share a passion for games or social media, please check out our jobs page for information on how to join us.  Otherwise, please feel free to let us know what you think, let us know what you would like to hear about or check out our Twitter feed at @eeGeo and tell us what you imagine when you think of games involving the real world?