Validate assumptions with qualitative and quantitative methods
The proposed solution aims to monetize the player experience by developing a community platform business model, connecting the die-hard murder/mystery game fans with the game club organizers to eliminate the time originally spent by the fans to find the scripts and locate the venues and the club owners to find players to join the game. To further narrow the scope, the geographical location that has been targeted for a pilot market entry evalution is “Wenzhou温州”. Nonetheless, further validation of critical assumptions of what will engage the different parties and make them come back regularly for more by joining the paid subscription program has to be conducted as follows.
To make an appointment to play the game with other fans is the first functional requiremetnt that needs to be validated. Both usability test and AB test will be conducted to obtain feedback for the validation. The usability test can provide qualitative responses from 5 chosen users from the target persona group regarding the “why”, reasons they articulated verbally in the test engagement and the AB test results can provide quantitative responses coming from a broader audience base regarding the “what” — whether people really click the button or submit the form or not.
Five usability tasks were designed to test the ease of use in making an appointment to play the game with other fans:
1. Where would you click to get information
2. How would you get more details and what details would you get
3. Find someone who can play the game with you and consider whether or not to realize
a “约本” activity
4. Register and log in
5. Fill in the appointment information and submit
Three post-test questions were also designed to obtain recommendations for improvement:
1. Please rate the overall process: 5 as very satisfied, 1 as very dissatisfied
2. What difficulties did you encounter in the process?
3. How do you think the page can be improved?
A/B test:
At first, to make the functions more clearly separated, the appointment function and the discussion function were designed on two different pages. Since the appointment and forum services are the two most important parts of the platform, they were designed to be tested in the A/B test. This A/B test is designed to see which functions are more important for script murder game players and decide which function to be the main function of the online community. For one thing, a discussion forum allows players to communicate with each other; for another, making the appointment is the crucial part of realizing 约本 activities.
The original version: on the homepage, there are three cards posted to direct users to different pages including scripts collection, venues collections, and the forum. When users click the “view more” button of the forum card, they will be redirected to the forum page. For the variant 1 version, the third card on the page was redesigned. The major function of the card was changed to be the appointment function. When users click on the “view more” button, they will be redirected to the appointment page.
The results can be found here.
