Overview

Background

Nickelodeon needed to brainstorm AR design ideas on how children could interact with four segments of the KCSA show while live on air.

Goal

Brainstorm and develop design criteria and design ideas for how children will interact with the KCSA live on air via AR.

My Role

• Liaison: Communicate with the client (Nickelodeon) to discuss their goals and concerns, and assist in developing research questions

• Methodology: Plan research methodology, including methods and analysis

• Methods remixing: Design a modified version of a pre-existing co-design technique to cater to study needs

• Implement: Carry out study with participants, gather data

• Analyze: Lead data analysis to build findings and recommendations

• Deliverable: Build a report (doc) for the client and discuss outcomes in an in-person meeting

Participants

Eight 7-11 year-old children

Method

Due to their prior relationship with a multigenerational participatory design team with quick turnaround for recommendations, we decided to glean insight from child users directly via participatory design (in this case, I used cooperative inquiry techniques). The session was planned across 2 days, implemented on a third day, and findings and recommendations developed across 2 days.

Participatory Design Session

Data Analysis

Analysis begins in-situ

As children present, I record the ideas on a whiteboard and begin to group similar ideas together into themes. I confirm these initial themes and their definitions with the children.

Continued analysis

Using the initial themes for each segment of the show, I continue searching for similar patterns in design ideas and grouping them together via affinity diagramming.

Results and Impact

Children want to actively participate in specific KCA segments

• Play the same games as the live show (e.g., if show displays table tennis, we play AR table tennis with an avatar)

• Prank the on-stage members (e.g, ”steal” the award)

• Produce and control AR objects on screen during awards (e.g., throw AR flowers, confetti, slime) that may later turn into real objects in the show

Recommendation

Allow app users to participate in the same activity occurring on screen and control some aspects of the show where possible.

Impact

As the on-screen talent played basketball, app users could simultaneously engage in an AR basketball game.

Children like to slime their space

• Slime their space when someone on the show gets slimed

• Slime people around me

• Slime the furniture, floors, walls, objects

Recommendation

During the KCAs, when one is slimed, the app users should also be slimed.

Impact

When people were slimed or participated in slime activities on-screen, app users’ homes were simultaneously slimed with the same color slime.

Implement non-KCSA AR activities

• AR activities they can do at any point during or after KCAs

• These can be the same activities as those during the KCAs (e.g., slime my home; AR table-tennis) or standalone activities (e.g., randomly add flying kittens to my space)

Recommendation

The app should come preinstalled with silly and random games and AR characters for users to engage with.

Impact

App users could play with AR animations of popular cartoons in their spaces, slime their spaces, and always play KCA games (e.g., AR basketball) outside of the live TV event.

Conclusion

Nickelodeon implemented three recommendations from the participatory design session in their Screens Up app that children used during the 2018 KCSA

The Screens Up app is still used today both as a standalone entertainment AR app and as a supporting AR experience for varying Nickelodeon shows (e.g., “play-along” episodes) and events (e.g., KCAs)