Sims 4 Rework
About
As part of a User Research Module in school, we were tasked to rework an existing application.
This included going through the whole UX process - initial research of the existing app, users, user flow, low-fidelity and hi-fidelity mockups, and user testing.
Project details
This project was done in a team of 6 during my junior year at DigiPen (Singapore). (2023)
What I brought to the team
Click on the icons below to go straight to the section!
Task Flow / Game research
Documentation
Prototyping (Figma)
User Testing
I mainly helped with the initial research, as well as documentation of task flows, empathy maps and our user testing results - which allowed us to properly track our progress and make changes according to our test results.
Contributions:
Documentation
Task Flow, Empathy Map
Game Research
Minor Prototyping
User Testing
Game Analysis
As a team, we made sure to play the game and analyse it's strengths or weaknesses in terms of its UX. This would give us guidelines on what worked, and illuminate pain points that players may face.
Confirmation Menus as a strong point
Cluttered UI as a pain point
User Research
To start, we crafted empathy maps, personas and task flows to form the base of our UX rework.
1. Empathy Maps
The team first made empathy maps from each member, based on our first-hand experience with the game. This would help us find common pain points or specific features and actions we would take.
Example Empathy Map
2. Persona
We crafted 1 primary and 1 secondary persona to base our UX rework on.
​
Our primary persona being Sims 4's main target audience, and our secondary persona as some who would play the Sim's casually.
Personas
3. Task Flow
This is the game's current task flow. Drafting this out would help us visualize the actions the user would take, and streamline this process as much as possible.
Task Flow
Paper Prototypes, Testing
The team proceeded with making paper prototypes based on the user flow.​
This was done in 2 stages - Low Fidelity, and Mid Fidelity (which made improvements based on user testing)
​
In the testing itself, we took note of issues the users faced, and later on compiled common pain points.
​
The low fidelity mockup would follow the original game closely, to help us confirm the results in our internal testing.
Common pain point
We then came up with possible changes to address the feedback in our next prototype.
Recommended Changes
This process was then repeated in our next prototype. We needed to test the additional features that were added. In doing so, we found out whether our solutions worked, or created more unexpected issues.
​
An example would be the world selection pop up. While it was meant to address the issue of giving players information to make a meaningful world selection, testers commented that the use of icons were not sufficient, as they did not contain enough information.
World Selection Popup
World Selection Popup Feedback
Hi-Fi Mockups
After getting the results from the paper protype testing, we moved into creating Hi-Fi Mockups in Figma.
Due to the scope of our project, we could not do further testing - but used this to address the main issues faced by the users.
Changes made for unclear lot information pain point
A full document of the testing and research can be found on the PDF link below.