Di Xu

My team is tasked with creating a resource management board game.

Play testing showed that board game need to be fun, and beginner-friendly. This means having concrete goals, and manageable rules.

When onboarding, novice players of board games become confused and give up reading the rule sheets before jumping straight into play. Educational games about recycling can be lengthy and boring.

My team created a board game where the player becomes the mayor of a city, and manages its trash recycling. The game is modeled after Rival Restaurants, but with simpler onboarding and faster gameplay, targeting players driven by competition, aesthetics, and completion.

Beyond 12's technology platform and coaches provide low-income, first-generation, and historically under-represented students with the support they need to succeed in higher education and in life. When moving into the community college space, Beyond 12 and IDEO approached us to consider their upcoming products, and answer the question: how might Beyond 12 use its digital coaching platform to mobilize community college students to redesign their institutions so they are more accessible, affordable, inclusive, and relevant?

About two-thirds of students at California’s community colleges and private for-profit two-year schools are from the lowest-income families (PPIC). Mobilizing community college students who are low-income present unique challenges. My team narrowed down the scope of the brief by asking: how might we create an efficient system to prioritize and address low income students' organized efforts for change?

Community college students have less time than other students to create change on their campuses, however they also have a lot of good ideas for improvements. The current system for creating change is bureaucratic and confusing. Students need a proposal system that can connect students to the right people to make something happen. In order to create effective and meaningful change, students, student leaders, as well as administrators need to collaborate, instead of working in silos.

We created the concept of a web and mobile based forum that can connect students with administrators at their community colleges, facilitate support among peers, allow transparency of the bureaucratic process, and reduce the onboarding time for student leaders hoping to create change.

Activision's Call of Duty Companion App team approached our classroom for Interaction Design and challenged students to consider how can Call of Duty companion app create social features that keep players engaged with the game and each other. In this project I used multiple user research methods such as stakeholder interview, domain expert interview, secondary research, and user interviews. With the findings from this work, I visualized my recommendations using wireframes and example screens for the Call of Duty Companion App.

The problem that keeps players, especially female players away from being socially engaged with the app is the toxic culture that prevails in the Call of Duty player community. How might we cultivate a supportive culture within the player community retroactively?

A toxic community decreases engagement from potential new players. In order to create high engagement of the companion App, we can address the root of the problem by creating ways to promote progress, and to lead by example.

The concept I proposed to this problem includes suggestions that would involve organizational change at Activision, as well as a range of considerations when designing a companion app. The solution to a systematic problem involves a solution that could be implemented at the level of the companion app: making it more accessible to both active and inactive players, and advertising of career opportunities within Activision form within the Companion app.