Engaging Design & Planning Practitioners in the Co-Production of a Data Coupled Video Game Decision Support System

Abstract

The primary purpose of the project was to evaluate and refine the Land.Info decision support system (DSS). Land.Info is a 3D immersive video game-based DSS that casts users in the role of designer, allowing them to design park infrastructure in virtual city spaces and receive real-time feedback based on their decisions (e.g. cost, amount of rainwater stored, carbon sequestration, etc. Ultimately Land.Info empowers citizens with decision support for the design of open spaces. This project builds on an existing prototype of the Land.Info DSSThat was developed by a previous team. The current prototype requires user testing and further refinement to become an intuitive and fully functioning DSS to aid users. This project was built upon a previous team’s final deliverables. We continued exploring what are the usability issues of the current version of the DSS; the severity of those issues and recommend prioritizing the major issues to bridge the the gap between the current gaming experience with an ideal one. We first evaluated the usability of the current DSS by using the Heuristic Evaluation method. The major issues were Consistency and Standards, Aesthetic and Minimalist Design, and Instruction and Documentation. Informed by the results of the heuristic evaluation, we implemented significant features that were missing from the current version so that the DSS would be more intuitive with improved functionality. The features we added include a smoother player perspective with all the movements. We also implemented 4 tutorials for visualizing important effects: rainstorm; snow, grass, and flower blooming, as well as lighting and shade effects. It is recommended that future work conduct a usability analysis of these new features. *Heuristic Evaluation process and results: examine the game based on Jakob Nielsen’s ten general principles and identify the usability issues

*New features implantation on the six tutorials for visualizing: based on the evaluation results, implement essential features into the game that bridge the gap between the current and the ideal tutorial experiences