Adventure Academy
A massively multiplayer online game (MMO) designed for elementary and middle school-age students, emerged as a groundbreaking project aiming to bring learning to life while addressing the gap in educational content for older learners. The project was initiated due to the limitations of Age of Learning's flagship product, ABCmouse, which primarily targeted children up to 8 years old. The challenge was to provide a quality learning experience for older students, resulting in the creation of Adventure Academy.
Problem Statement
The initial beta testing phase revealed a significant discrepancy between the anticipated and actual demographics. The interested user base was younger than expected, and a large portion lacked familiarity with quest-based MMOs. This posed a challenge to ensure a smooth First Time User Experience (FTUE) for younger players, leading to the need for innovative UX/UI solutions.
Design Process
As the UX/UI designer, collaboration with game designers and developers was crucial throughout the project. The primary focus was on FTUE, and tools were developed within the game to guide users through key objectives. Special attention was given to addressing the age diversity by implementing UI and engineering tools to teach players the basic principles of an MMO. A tutorial instance, presented in the game's kiosk, served as a visual guide for players to interact with activities related to their current quest objectives.
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Results
The efforts invested in enhancing the FTUE paid off with Adventure Academy achieving remarkable success. It was awarded App of the Day on the App Store, won the 2020 Best Parenting Product Award, and received recognition as the Best Gamification App in the Tech Advocate Awards 2020. New features like Daily Challenges, aimed at reinforcing the game's core loop, further contributed to the app's popularity.
Key Features
First Time Users
The most important piece of information used in the product is the actual age of the players. While we aim for children 3rd–8th grade there is a much younger audience playing Adventure Academy. This means they needed a lot of direction during their initial experiences of the game. Therefore, we worked on an initiative towards implementing a series of UI and engineering tools to teach players the basic principles of an MMO. My role was to design UI elements, create prototypes, and work with engineers to build these tutorials.
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Below is an example of a tutorial instance in the game's kiosk, a visual for the players to interact with the activity that's related to their current quest objective. The kiosk is the catalogue of activities in Adventure Academy. It was built as a tool for the curriculum department to be able to add, remove, customize, and categorize all the thousands of activities.
Daily Challenges
The Daily Challenges feature was created to incentivize players to complete learning activities as well as increase their daily logins. It required progress tracking, a new currency and items unique to the feature. After implementation there was a 90% interaction rating with active users. My role on the project required conceptual wireframes, UI design, high fidelity prototypes and final delivery of assets.
Clubs
Another interesting finding was that players that socialize more with other players tend to complete more learning activities. Therefore, it was decided that a club feature would be implemented into the game were players can join or create a club, complete club missions and earn prizes in order to increase social activity.
Activity Completed UX
After a player completes any activity in the game they are presented with a fun interactive pop up to maintain engagement. The primary objective was for players to play one of the related activities, however, it was also requested to implement both an "Add to Favorites" and "Rate this Activity" component in order to collect data on the activities. It was a joy to to create the UI and UX as well as work with engineers to bring this feature to life.
UI Design
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In order to achieve consistent pixel perfect UI throughout the product I find it very important to have a style guide especially a UI kit. I wanted this guide to be a source of knowledge for designers and developers to reference as well as a tool to be utilized throughout the production process. I created a kit with UI specifications as well as a library of nine-sliced assets that are accessible to engineers. This kit would contain button interaction prototypes.
Conclusion
Adventure Academy stands as a testament to the successful fusion of education and gaming, addressing the needs of a diverse age group through thoughtful UX/UI design. The project not only met its objectives but exceeded expectations by garnering prestigious awards and accolades in the educational technology space. The holistic approach to UX design played a pivotal role in creating an immersive and educational gaming experience for young learners.
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