Relate
Redefining feedback collection through interactive icebreaker games.
Current feedback collection tools are one dimensional
The current landscape of examining feedback and discussing with team members is often surface-level, resource-intensive, or unorganized. Surveys don't allow for interactive discussion of ideas, one-on-one interviews are too time-consuming for convenience, and traditional verbal meetings tend to be too unstructured to yield productive insights.
Relate: Making feedback collection engaging
Hosting ice-breaker games make collecting feedback informative, engaging, and convenient. Relate is an online ice-breaker platform designed to gather team-based feedback and discussion in convenient, interactive ways that support team-bonding and creativity.
Scroll through to learn more about Relate and its three games
The Situation
Relate is an ongoing project in the Tech4GoodLab designed to encourage creative methods of feedback collection to gather detailed insights without heading into the pitfalls that surveys and interviews fall into. The long term goals for Relate was to propose a new system of feedback collection, design and develop that system into a product, run a pilot study on users to test the product, and write a research paper based on the insights from the pilot study.
To ensure that we can meet these long term goals in the future, our UX Research team focused on evaluating the interface's usability and conducting early outreach to form a list of interested organizations that could later help test the product once it was developed and launched.
The Task
Evaluate the usability of the newly redesigned Relate platform through heuristic evaluations.
Conduct partnership outreach to garner early interest in Relate from other community-building organizations.
Evaluating the usability of Relate's new interface
Our team looked through the new Relate designs and made notes on usability issues that conflict with Apple's Essential Design Principles and Nielsen's Heuristics. Throughout our evaluation, we found a total of 83 heuristic violations within the Relate designs from Summer 2021.
Click to view full documents
Highlight: It was difficult for users to correct mistakes
Our team has found that users struggled to edit or delete responses after submitting a response to a Relate form. The absence of these features is frustrating for users who may have submitted a response by mistake or due to a misunderstanding in understanding the prompt.
Feel free to view our team's heuristic violations in the embedded file
Pilot Study Outreach
Overall, our team reached out to 33 community-based organizations and 16 student-led organizations from UCSC. Among these organizations, 2 community-based and 2 student-led organizations has shown interest in the Relate platform. We conducted interviews and cognitive walkthroughs with each of these organizations to gather early feedback from the platform and received the following findings for each Relate game.
Draw It Out
"The Draw It Out game seems a bit confusing since the drawing aspect and the response-revealing aspect of the game seem completely unrelated. However, it does hold potential in being a team-bonding activity."
Six Hats
"The Six Hats game is very intriguing for organizations because the Six Hats thinking framework allows teams to have constructive discussion of ideas by distributing different roles to team members in the conversation."
Two Corners
"The Two Corners game can potentially be problematic because the nature of the game values popular opinions to rank ideas. Minority opinions can feel dismissed and sometimes those opinions carry the most valid ideas."
Interview Insights
Most organizations agreed that the Relate platform was an intriguing, powerful tool for gathering community and team-based feedback. Relate's game activities are an engaging way of collecting a wide variety of ideas from teams and communities.
It seems like the Six Hats game is the most favored game concept from potential partnership organizations due to how constructive and innovative the concept was for promoting healthy brainstorming discussion. Draw It Out and Two Corners seem to have a couple of concerns related to the clarity and validity of their gameplay respectively, but they are both considered interesting concepts to test out in future pilot studies.
Wizard of Oz Prototyping
To conclude the quarter, our team participated in a Wizard of Oz Prototype using Miro to get an early taste of how the platform is supposed to feel since a developed version of Relate wasn't playable yet. The Wizard of Oz Prototype was conducted by a lead from Relate's development team who gathered all of our feedback from the prototype experience.
Our overall thoughts of the experience was:
It was fun playing a pictionary-style game where we are asked to draw one out of a selection of words, but the drawing aspect of the game was almost completely unrelated to the prompt responses.
Our team felt closer collectively deciphering how our other team members would respond to certain prompts.
Our team felt like this collective discussion could potentially hinder people from writing more personal responses (in fear of knowing that others will see them).
Reflections
Working on Relate has helped me gain a stronger understanding of the entire user research process that goes into critiquing and iterating on the design process, and I'm extremely grateful that I could help it grow.
Engaging with a Wizard of Oz Prototype of Relate has helped me understand the importance of engaging with low-fidelity prototypes to get a feeling of a platform before moving onto the high-fidelity prototyping and development phases of a design concept.
Overall, this entire journey made me develop a newfound appreciation for all of the hard work that goes into critiquing, improving, and pitching design concepts.
