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We realized that the reality television market is very niche and has room to grow when it comes to platforms that allow enthusiasts to come together. Watching television is used to spend time with those around you and can strengthen relationships, which is why we decided to use reality television and make it even better. Using the foundation of Fantasy Football, we realized that if we gamify watching reality television, because there are an incredible amount of individuals who already enjoy watching reality television, we would be able to make this even more of an enjoyable and bonding experience.
Even if one does not enjoy watching reality television, gamifying the social experience of watching television with your friends or loved ones incentivizes individuals to participate.
Our application focuses on the in-person environment of being with your friends but goes beyond that by including an asynchronous option so your friendships aren't affected by distance.
As we thought about what we wanted the experience of the application to be like, we looked at examples that would help us integrate a leaderboard and point system based on speed & could group individuals, hence, Kahoot & Slido.
Kahoot was an ideal platform to use for our prototyping experience as it incorporated a leaderboard & showed users what they got wrong after answering a questions.
However, it did not allow for separate teams to play (everyone would have to play as one large group) and it did not allow us to play videos in-between questions or incorporate questions with the platform.
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Slido was a great option as it allowed us to have a Q&A section for users, a chat page, and the ability to release questions when we wanted to during the social experience.
Unfortunately, we could not embed videos within the platform and to truly use Slido's full functionality we would have to pay.
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For our first prototype, we asked participants to join a Google Sheets document where they would join their respective team's sheet & were prompted to answer questions between each of the clips that were played to which corresponding points were awarded per person as answers were put in.
At the end of playing the different clips, we totaled the participants’ scores and showed them their global leaderboard that showed the who got the most points out of all the teams.
We created the first prototype thinking the experience needed to feel cohesive, resulting in us showing three 5-9 minute long clips.
Unfortunately, users were not engaged, were confused, and could not remember names of the cast members which resulted in skewed results.
To fix these different points, we shortened our clips, provided multiple choice options in Prototype V2, and provided the names of the cast so users were not confused.
Each team had their own sheet where team members could see each others scores. Users could then see how inputting a certain answer would increase or decrease their score, resulting in them changing their answers to gain the most points.
We decided to remedy this by creating more of an individualized gameplay so that users could not see others' answers in Prototype V2.
Although the application's main selling point was synchronous gameplay, users told us that they would like flexibility with when they could answer the questions.
This resulted in our group creating an option for asynchronous gameplay which we integrated in Prototype V2.
For our second prototype we took a cleaner approach and decided to explore an Asynchronous option to Reality Rush, resulting in the two types of gameplay that are available on the app.
As part of the prototype, participants were separated into Asynchronous & Synchronous users and Asynchronous users preemptively entered their answers before the episode while Synchronous users answered “live”.
After participants submitted their answers, Synchronous users got their score back immediately while Asynchronous users got their scores released after the episode “aired" & and in the end everyone's score was released on the global leaderboard.
Because we used a Google Form in a quiz format, our system did not allow for users to see what the right answers were right after it was submitted.
We decided to integrate this idea into the final product so that users could receive feedback to their answers without waiting for the show or spoilers to tell them the correct answers.
In order to have fruitful asynchronous gameplay, we wanted users to have the ability to discuss among themselves within the application because watching television with your friends is just more fun.
A discussion board would also allow users to have social interaction with each other and chat about their shared experience.
Some feedback we got from the prototyping experience was that it would be great to have the ability to give users an option to share a link to direct individuals to the team's rankings & perhaps a summary of the questions and answers.
Ultimately, we decided to create a shareable link for users to invite members to join the groups they create for watching a show for our iteration but it is something to keep in mind for the future.
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Here we have our final design that is semi-playable with the major Home, Play, and Profile interfaces set up. Feel free to look through our various screens!
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