Me, Myself, & You Capstone Project: Designing for Inclusion
For my senior year design capstone, I worked with two classmates to conduct research and ideation sessions with our target users: young adults with mid to high functioning autism. We completed the end-to-end design process from ideation to social media marketing and manufacturing by raising over $5000 on IndieGogo’s Generosity platform to support the R&D for 50 games. We left the class with completed design files, a following of 500 followers on social media, and a desire to bring the game to the world. As a 3 person team working alongside full time jobs, we manufactured & shipped the games selling 25 to customers and donating 25 to nonprofit organizations in the Bay Area.
Me, Myself, and You is a board game designed by Devika Patel, Nina Ligon, and Claire Jacobson with the support of our professors and TA’s from the 216B&C series in the Stanford undergraduate Product Design program. Like our facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/PlayMMY/
We started tackling the space of product design for adults with disabilities because …
All three of us on my team had experience working on healthcare projects in developing nations, and we saw this user group in the U.S. as a critical first world population with unmet human needs. Furthermore, my teammates and I wanted to focus our last energies in undergrad on a product to intervene and improve the quality of life for individuals in a community near Stanford. Thus, we partnered with parents, adults with autism, doctors, teachers, and leaders of organizations for adults with autism in the Bay Area.
| needfinding
Here is the initial user story, my teammate Nina drafted based on our field research at one of the organizations we attended for immersive research, Autistry Studios.
A page from my logbook after an hour-long discussion with a researcher in the field of Autism at Stanford, who spoke to us about the stereotypes, key social challenges, and interpersonal communication styles based on her knowledge from her research participants and her younger brother with autism. She explained to us the challenges she found these individuals facing in their day to day lives, focusing on the topic of interpersonal connection and dating when we asked her the open-ended question, “How might we improve the quality of life and health for adults with autism?”
Devika and Nina connecting ideas to study and seek out features in strategy, roll/move, pick-a-card, and other formats of multi-player boardgames. You can see the exploration of characters & themes we brainstormed at the start based on our user group’s main interests.
| flare and refine
Back at the d.school, Devika and I played a game where we monologued on different topics of interest until we found convergence. This exercise emulated our users’ behavior and helped us align on the decision to build a board game to provide greater structure & techniques for socialization for our core user group.
| make, test, retest cycle
Once we landed on a board game product, it took us 5 weeks to iterate - encompassing testing new game designs, A/B testing our conversation questions, A/B testing colors, and gathering qualitative feedback to further improve customer satisfaction.
The first version of the game included a piece of form core and a structure around finding a convergence between your own passions and interests and that of someone else to find common ground to talk about.
We started with a 2-player game based on our interviews and initial product research. We quickly gathered feedback in game testing sessions that our 2-player hypothesis was wrong and that more people would want to play together at the same time. This feedback spurred us into action investigating different formats for group games which required added features like a board design to pair with the cards. We realized we needed a more thoughtful set of custom player pieces and cards. From our user testing we learned things like:
the colors to avoid in our game
the topics to avoid in the game questions
the topics people enjoyed most in the cards and the thematic elements that united those cards
the time it took users to complete a game
the level of engagement users felt based on number of players
how much the users, their parents, and their school/organization were willing to pay to help us determine manufacturers and pricing on the game in the market
Who did we test with?
We met first with a small group from the Autism Self Advocacy Network to test the game with high functioning adults at a game night. After a critical game update from our first session, we started user testing sessions with students from the Palo Alto Unified School District in the disabilities training program. These users comprised our control group of users and they tested all 5 iterations of the game design from the initial paper prototype to the final manufactured version. We finally hosted game nights with the last game prototype at Foothill College and at Abilities United to gather more diverse feedback from individuals ranging from 18-30’s years old and with a wider range of developmental disabilities. Only after completing the testing with a broader populating did we move to the manufacturing stage.
| marketing + final manufacturing
We carried out an initial round of marketing and fundraising using Indiegogo’s social impact campaign, Generosity, to raise funds for the manufacturing of 50 games in a 1 for 1 buy to give model. We marketed the game on social to gather more buzz and find customers across the country and the world to raise demand for manufacturing.
Here’s the final game manufactured in the US, assembled in Palo Alto in Devika’s apartment, and sold to 25 customers across the US, Thailand, S.Africa, and Singapore. We also donated 25 games to our local partner organizations using the game’s 1 for 1 purchasing model.
Sandtimer with custom game spinner, player pieces, and deck of playing cards.