With the recurring theme of high stress levels at Carnegie Mellon University and coursework being a big component of it, we explored tools they currently have available to better manage their stress levels. There are a number of existing apps on the market that aim to help reduce stress, unfortunately they didn't seem to be popular with the CMU undergraduate students. From our research, the high stress environment will continue to exist, and thus the focus of the project is to be able to better equip students to manage it.
Our solution focuses on an environment-interactive narrative gameplay as a means of covert stress reduction. Inspired by the design of mystery rooms, Mystery Run is a chapter based game which gets users to engage in stress reducing physical activities on and off screen.
Research has shown that high stress is part of the undergraduate experience at CMU and ufnortuantely at times in an life threatening way. Through testing, interviews and secondary research, we identified two main pain points of existing solutions: the lack of accessibility & the fact that they were too explicit as a solution for stress reduction.
From observations on campus, cafes and online chat portals many different triggers for and manifestations of stress in the CMU and virtual population became apparent, including, but not limited to: Coursework, Planning semester classes, Personal relationships & Social Anxiety.
15 hours of online & offline field observations
20 Studied precedents
4 stakeholder interviews
Survey
Literature review
Stress Relieving activities that we decided to move forward with: colouring, exercise, blowing/breathing, engaging story telling, challenge & solving puzzles.
We followed an iterative design cycle and conducted over 10 hours of user testing over 10 days. Each session led to new iterations, some with visual tweaks but the majority focussing on activities that reduced stress and excited the members to play.
Through quick user testing with paper prototypes we were able to validate our idea that a mystery game has the ability to reduce stress. We tested to see peoples reactions to the activities we had identified as stress reduction activities. Two such activities, which were a success were colouring to decode a message and walking around to find a code. Individuals also enjoyed the novelty of blowing into a screen.
Changing the narrative to make it more engaging and connected, we ran another test on lo-fi prototypes. At this point we also used card sorting to better understand what activities made people feel relaxed. Even though research says otherwise, to our surprise people were least likely to write, it gave them anxiety as it was to obvious of a stress relieving activity.
Users seemed to enjoy the narrative but wanted the puzzle solving to be more of a challenge. The sense of accomplishment for many was a stress buster. We also focused on being able to provide them enough help if they needed it. We continued to test, design and build the product over 10 days, by the end of which we had 5 different iterations.
Our final iteration is a real-world interactive game that guides users through a series of stress-reducing activities disguised as required steps to uncover a mystery. This is an ideal solution for our target population, who is highly stressed yet cynical about the efficacy of more traditional stress-reduction apps.
Given the benefits of persuasive techniques, we embedded 4 main persuasive principles into our game:
Our game was tested by and presented to faculty and students at CMU where we received a very positive response and a large pool of people who were interested to be early adopters.
Over the summer we would potentially be working with collaborating with CMU in running a pilot of the first chapter across campus.
