Character Playbook (2016)
Character Playbook developed in partnership with EverFi and TGA is an interactive series of modules in a comic book format that educates teens on emotional wellbeing and social interactions.
My Role
I was the art director and UX design consultant for the project.
The art concept and learning content was already established but no art pipeline existed.
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Lessons Learned
One Centralized Location
Before I joined the team, the art assets were stored in a number of different places. All were separated from tasks and wireframes making it hard to tell what each piece of art correlated with and if it was the latest version. I switched over to Jira and this worked really well for our team of artists. I was able to break down asset sheets easily, organize them according to the wireframes and script sheets and assign them out. We kept feedback and reversions in the same management system so everything was localized in one place. We filed all assets into different Stories for each Module to keep everything organized and easily searchable.
From a UX standpoint it just reinforces that the system of least resistance will always be the most used.
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Importance of Having a Consistent UI System
Having a consistent UI system is important in establishing expectations that users have. Breaking these expectations is called a schema break. This is when something happens that is not expected. Schema breaks can be powerful tools for questioning assumptions and changing user behavior. I talk about such example in Mushroom 11. However, breaking a schema for engagement is always ill advised. Instead, breaking up activity types will make sure players stay engaged while keeping expectations intact. Make sure that activities don't repeat too often. Don't offer too many multiple choice questions in a row, break it up with a different interaction. This is what we did in Character Playbook and it worked really well.
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