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Facing the world
UX research, UX design
Facing the World is a virtual reality serious game that aims to alleviate social anxiety symptoms.
Timeline
Category
Type
My role
Tools
3 months
UX research, UX design
Virtual reality game
UX researcher, UX designer, Developer, User study facilitator
Miro, Figma, EkoStudio, Unity, Pico headset, C#
This project was realized during my first year of study in Human Computer Interaction.
We were a team of 5 students and we designed a virtual reality game combining medical purposes and life simulation type of game for people with social anxiety.
?
!
Solution
Problem
People with social anxiety disorder (SAD) symptoms do not seek treatment because they would avoid health services due to the social interaction involved in the care process. However, one of the best treatment is to face this type of situation through exposure therapy.
To solve this problem, I designed a virtual reality serious game that allow people with SAD to overcome their fear of social interaction by experiencing social events during the game.
The purpose of the game is to make the existing forms of therapy known and accessible to as many people as possible and to inform the general public of one of the most common psychiatric disorder in the world.
Design process
Understand
Story interviews, Survey,
Literature review, Personas
Design
Design concept, User flow, Scenario
Implement
Prototype in Unity +
ekoStudio
Test
Usability testing,
improvments
Story Interviews
During the ideation phase of the project, I conducted user interviews to build new personas and to inform the design decision. Together with the team, we prepared an interview script with 8 open-ended questions, focusing on our target audiences’ experience with social anxiety, their struggles, their coping mechanisms, and their daily routines. I recruited and interviewed one student in journalism remotely. We directed the questions to their experiences with the disorder and the methods they elaborated to face them.
As we gathered the answers of the interviews with the team, we realized that the age range of the people interviewed was pretty small. All of them were students in different areas. We also found that most of them were self-diagnosed. We decided to not discard them as their symptoms were identical to the symptoms of the SAD-diagnosed people, sometimes even more severe. We also found out that the source of their fear was different and all have found a different and personal way to cope with them.
With the different answers' spectrum, we decided to collect the opinions from a larger number of people to validate these findings.
Survey
We built an online survey composed of multiple-choice questions and shared it in various relevant communities. In just a few days, we received 59 submissions. The answers obtained are consistent with those collected during the interviews:
- The age range is 18-25 years
- The most fearful situations that causes SA symptoms are talking
in public, talking to a stranger, and speaking on the phone.
- Most respondents are not diagnosed
- Most respondents still have social anxiety
One of the coping mechanisms that we have identified is avoidance. People with social anxiety tend to avoid or minimize their time spending in interacting with people. With regards to these findings, we decided to conduct further research in existing therapies.
Literature review
+ interview with psychologist
Because our aim touch the medical field, we felt it was important to learn about existing treatments in therapy with a professional and treatments with the help of a virtual environment that would mimick real-life cases of interaction. We conducted a literature review on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) and Mindfulness Therapy to understand better the benefits and limitations of these types of treatement.
Those interviews, survey and research has allowed us to design an appropriate solution for the target users.
Personas
We wanted to form a deeper understanding of our users' goals, needs, experiences, and behaviors. So, we created 3 personas based on user interviews and surveys, and we used these personas whenever we wanted to step out of ourselves and reconsider our initial ideas.
These personas helped us define the content of the application. We specified the age, the main occupation and their lifestyle. They are all different but have the same goal in mind which is facing their fear of social interactions and seeking for therapy. However, they are afraid to take the necessary steps, or can't afford going to see a psychologist because of the time spent, or don't think they have to.
We went to the design phase by taking into account these different positions on not seeking professional help. These personas were redefined on the latest stages of the design process during the usability test of the calm environment test.
Design concept
Based on the information gathered, we felt it was important to propose a system that would address the reluctance of people with social anxiety to seek care.
Thus, we came up with the idea of creating a virtual reality serious game that would aim to alleviate social anxiety symptoms while following therapies' principles. As the target users are in the younger spectrum, we found relevant to design a system that will reach people's interests, and the gamification of a medical treatment was the most promising solution we elaborated to promote care.
One of the main challenges was to make the game accessible to as many people as possible, as we discovered that more people than expected suffer from social anxiety. The biggest decision we had to come up with was the choice of the game's platform : mobile or virtual reality. We finally stick with the virtual reality environment as it is a good compromise between accessibility and immersive properties.
The interview with the psychologist was helpful to redefine the purpose of the game. This game comes forward with the mindset of not replacing actual therapy but to highlight their existence to users through a virtual experience. At least, the users are able to discover and practice with the game, and seeking for conventional treatment afterwards.
Game Design
The game is thus composed of two different spaces : a life simulation type of game inpired by VRET named 'Experience Environment' and a relaxation place where users can practice mindfulness therapy named 'Calm Environment'.
In the Experience Environment, the player embodies the persona of a student that will live their student life and challenge themselves through different social interactions. These social interactions are taken from the 24 situations listed in the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale test (LSAS) and adapted to the student life of the character.
We have built scenarios that propose multiple endings depending on the actions and responses of the player. Because the challenges are based on communication and social situations, the user needs to talk to the virtual characters to fulfill the task. If they take too much time to answer, their energy bar decreases.
When the energy bar is empty they are sent to the Calm Environment to recharge their batteries.
The Calm Environment is a way to alleviate the player’s SAD symptoms that might have occurred while playing in the Experience Environment. The Calm Environment is personalized according to the player through a questionnaire they have to fill at the beginning before starting the game.
In this environment we have integrated three types of calming exercises: (1) Box-breathing, (2) Counting and (3) Progressive muscle relaxation; All of them based on Mindfulness Therapy. The player can explore the built-in scene they customized and choose the exercise they want to practice. With these exercises, they get to have a full body and mind experience, while learning healthy coping mechanisms to certain situations.
While being in the Calm Environment, the user’s energy bar gets higher and therefore they can continue the game in the Experience Environment.
User flow
After defining the 2 environments, I have listed and organized the components of each environment. Thus, we were able to create the sitemap to define user flows and navigation.
The user flow helped us redefine and redesign the switch between the Experience Environment and the Calm Environment. The switch is supposed to happen when the game in the Experience Environment start to become difficult to play for the player. For moral reasons, we couldn't wait until the energy bar is empty to enable the access of the Calm Environment, as the player might start feeling anxious and unwell a few moment ago. We decided to change the user flow and to allow access of the Calm Environment at any time during the game through a permanent button at the right bottom of the interface.
Additionally, the players might only be interested in the exercises of the Calm Environment. We changed our initial user flow to allow access of it in the main home page, next to the access of the life simulation game. Finally, we added a training menu in the Experience Environment to let the players that already encountered some challenges in the story to practice them again.
Scenario of both environments
After defining the user flow of the game, we drew the scenarios of both environments.
The scenario of the game should be realistic to offer greater immersion during the interaction with the virtual characters but also entertaining as the players should feel comfortable enough to challenge themselves and be willing to play again. The story unfolds over 8 days with several challenges each day. The challenges taken from LSAS are blended into the life of the main character to create a convincing and attractive storytelling, so that players are practicing without knowing.
The calm environment was designed to let the players walk around in addition to practicing the exercises. Yes, looking at a landscape can be as relaxing as breathing! We decided to display instructions on how to perform those exercises in big even though they don't look nice and realistic sometimes. We found essential to guide the players a minimum to teach them the proper techniques. This was the only requirement we had for the Calm Environment.
Implementation
During our design process, considering the different constraints and time-limits, we came to the decision of focusing on the development of a high-fidelity prototype of the Calm Environment. Therefore, we worked on two different calming scenes and the three previously mentioned calming exercises using Unity.
For the Experience Environment, we wrote 3 challenges: (1) a phone call with a doctor, (2) being late for class and (3) resist a high pressure salesman. We were able to build a low-fidelity video prototype of the phone call challenge using EkoStudio.
Usability testing
User testing
We conducted two experiments of the calm environment prototype in total. The first experiment did not include quantitative measurements, so we conducted the second experiment in which we included suggestions for improvement from testers' feedback.
Our evaluation method had specific inclusion criteria such as:
(1) the participants should be older than 18yo
(2) be diagnosed with SAD
However, because of our testing conditions being limited, and the lack of a professional in psychology being present, we decided to keep only the first criteria.
The exclusion criteria for all participants is having gross visual, hearing or speech impairments.
We recruited three participants for the pilot experiment, and three for the main experiment. They were all students with a mean age of 23.5. One of the participants identifies with the symptoms of SAD.
For the second experiment, we evaluated the effect of exploring one of the Calm Environment scenes and the efficiency along with the pleasantness of the exercises through likert scale questionnaire, semi-conducted interviews and biometric data.
Because we had trouble connecting the virtual reality game and the VR headset, we decided on conducting the experiment using an alternative: a wall-size display that give the impression of being inside the display, according to several research papers such as the study of Bezarios et al..
To compare the level of anxiety and the stress before and after experiencing the Calm Environment, we designed what we called the 'Experience Room' (a) and the 'Calm Room' (b). The 'Experience Room' aims to induce anxiety and stress, and the 'Calm Room' aims to alleviate those symptoms through the exploration of the Calm Environment.
Measurement : Efficiency of the Calm Environment + pleasantness of exercises
Findings:
- Biometric data : in the 'Calm Room', participants’ heart rate usually decreased to around 84 bpm just from entering the room, which was already set with the visuals and sounds. It continued to decrease while partaking the 3 exercises
- Likert scale questionnaire : mild sense of immersiveness and high level of agreeableness concerning the Calm Environment and exercises
During the semi-conducted interviews, we were able to get valuable feedback on how the exercises could be improved in order to be better implemented.
Next steps ?
This project is far from over. We have received valuable feedback from the experiment that we can build on. We received suggestions on how to improve the experiment setting and the Calm Environment implementation.
The next steps will be mainly focused on the implementation and the usability test of the Experience Environment.
Develop other scenes for the Calm Environment
+ improve the visualisation of the calming exercises (prototyping, mockups before re-implementing)
- mockups of the home button, energy bar, calm environment button
- create scenes of the first scenario
- build the link between the 2 environments
1
2
3
Testing both Calm and Experience Environments and redesigning according to the feedback
Learnings
What was beneficial?
- the target user interviews + interview with psychologist. We learned and share a lot with the interviewees about this phobia, it was rewarding in a personal level
- the implementation, my skills in C# improved
What to improve?
- the interviewees, we interviewed the same type of person, if we had more time we would have tried to contact other profiles
- the ideation phase, we decided on the concept pretty fast. Another session of brainstorming could have helped us broaden our perspectives
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