Alexa, play NHPR Civics 101
An Alexa Trivia Game to improve civics knowledge
My Role: Product Designer at Dali Lab
Team: 3 developers, 3 designers, 1 project manager
Partners: NHPR Civics101 Podcast team
Timeline: 10 weeks in Fall, 2020
Mission: Increase engagement with podcast content amongst NHPR Civics 101 listeners and pertain to a larger audience to increase civics knowledge.
Problem
American school curriculums vary greatly in their approach to civics. Citizenship Exam material is dry. Generally citizens have a poor understanding of government practices. Although there exists a wealth of civics information available online, much of it is unengaging. Our partners, NHPR Civics 101, approached us with this problem to further their podcast with an Alexa trivia application to help widen their audience.
How might we make American civics fun and engaging?
Solution
An Alexa civics trivia game that furthers the knowledge from NHPR Civics 101’s podcast in a more enjoyable, informative, and motivating gamified learning experience, that pertains to a larger audience.
Research
To start thinking about how we can increase civics knowledge we started researching what other trivia and civics products are out there and why those tools do not work effectively.
We set a few expectations for our product from this research:
- Our product shouldn’t feel academic which most other civics applications do
- It should have a sense of community building
- A very diverse group of people use civics apps
Keeping this is mind, we had the advantage of understanding our partner’s existing user base from their civics podcast. I decided to send a survey to current listeners to understand their demographic better. We found that most existing users were older than 30 years and not many had digital home devices like Alexa, or Google Home even though this is what the partners were keen earlier on.
User Focus
This left us in a dilemma, trying to balance what the partners wanted from the product and what the user they suggested required. We had to figure out whether then to expand our audience or how we could move to a mobile app instead which would be more inclusive to all people. For this, we created user personas of potential groups that could really use a civics trivia application:
We were ready to move away from the Alexa idea but after interviewing these groups and talking to the partners and mentors, we realized doing an Alexa application was a really cool new opportunity.
Why audio Alexa App over Mobile app?
- It leverages current users to move the demographic of people older than 30 to be younger which increases the civics widespread to a younger age category.
- Current users can be actively engaged with the material after listening to the podcasts to know whether they absorbed the information.
- The survey revealed most people multitasked while listening to the podcast so having an audio based application allows users to continue doing so.
- It maintains that these audio based learners are getting more knowledge in the same style of learning.
Keeping the above points in mind, we moved back to an Alexa application and changed our user personas a little to maintain the happy balance between users and our partners. The users we concentrate on are high school students trying to pass their school civics exam to graduate, an immigrant studying for the citizenship exam, and a trivia enthusiast testing their knowledge. For all three users, this application can be used as the primary mode of studying but more so to have fun with the knowledge they are consuming elsewhere like in school books or podcasts.
Interview
We then started directly researching user needs through interviews using the following guide:
Interview Takeaways
- Our product should strike the right balance between competitive and a supportive learning environment to self motivate users to improve their Civics knowledge.
“What makes trivia fun is the “Aha! I got it correct!” moments.”
2. Our product should encourage community building and conversation around Civics.
“I loved when my floor mate talked to me about his interest in politics when he saw me listening to Civics101!”
3. Users like to have control of when to start, stop or pause game and play at their own speed.
4. People enjoy the multitasking aspect of podcasts which we should maintain.
5. Accessibility is very important for a diverse group of users.
Brainstorming
Keeping these points in mind, we brainstormed several potential features for user engagement with civics.
Key Design Features
- Play and Learn mode
From our user feedback, we decided to create two modes- learn and play. The learn mode has unlimited questions and goes on till the user ends the game and does not keep score to allow users to concentrate on understanding the material in a supportive environment rather than feel the need to get the questions correct. The play mode fuels users who frequently listen to podcasts or have an existing civics knowledge who want to test themselves with more past paced questions to get the round of 7 questions correct.
Putting the above into words, these are the flows for the two modes:
2. Playing in different categories
The different modes have different categories but the user flow for each is the same. Only the questions pulled from the database varies.
Citizenship Test: Targets the immigrant user group as it simulates the US citizenship test by pulling seven questions from the standardized bank of 100 questions used for the actual test.
General Knowledge: This is the main question bank about general civics that will remain consistent even as the product continues to grow and evolve. It connects to NHPR Civics101’s podcasts and can be useful to students.
Current Events: This is a specially-made set of seven questions that are replaced monthly and address what is happening in the news today, appealing to the trivia enthusiasts. This category also leaves users with a thought provoking question when they end the session so that their learning continues even when not playing the trivia game adding to the idea of change making and community through the app.
3. Global Commands
We created four global commands for users to reference throughout their Trivia experience and made them as intuitive as possible:
- By saying “change mode”, “change category”, Alexa will navigate down the initial flow to select a new mode or category respectively.
- “End session” and “repeat options” carry out the appropriate action. We also allowed alternative forms of these words to be registered by Alexa, like “end game” instead of end session to ensure a smoother interaction.
- We initially allowed the command to “change speed” which we removed due to tech barriers of having to remake or speed up each of Nick’s (NHPR Civics101 partner) audio’s individually.
- A “learn more” mode would connect users to the appropriate Spotify podcasts but seemed unnecessary after user testing so was deleted as well.
4. Different flows for first time user and consistent user
The flow gives a description of the different global commands and modes and categories only for the first time user to prevent returning users getting annoyed by a long starting slow every time (analagous to too many clicks for an action) but ensuring first time users understand how the game works.
Initial Flow
The introductory flow is the same for all modes and categories. Once a user opens NHPR Trivia, they are introduced to the global commands and have the option to select play or learn. If the user has previously completed a game and wants to play again, they will be added to the flow. They can then play that game or go forward to choose their required category.
User Testing MVP
As designers, we grappled with trying to test our prototype in a way that removed ourselves and automated the testing as if it was Alexa responding to the user but without having developed the application still. As a solution, we used the Wizards of Oz technique — we created a Google Slides presentation with imbedded automated audio on top of our mural of all possible flows that the user can go through. We muted ourselves during testing and allowed this ‘sound board’ to do its magic by pressing play on different buttons based on what the user said. I created the audio for Alexa in a simple manner by typing words on Google Translate and recording the speech audio instead of taking time from the developers to do this simple task.
Key Changes
After getting feedback from our users and developer progression we changed the following aspects of our application:
- The division between the two modes made clearer in the introduction.
- Nick’s voice used for most of the talking- intro, flow, and questions- instead of Alexa’s robotic voice.
- Added reprompts of what Alexa would say if she does not register a response from the user.
- Simplified the saving game and restarting saved game flow.
- Removed global commands ‘learn more’ and ‘change speed’ due to technical issues as described previously.
Final Flow
These changes led to the final flow that our developers implemented:
Making it a reality
All audio by Alexa once the game is started was recorded by our partners- NHPR Civics 101 Podcast team. The frontend code is hosted on AWS Lambda and our Node.js backend is connected to a Google Firebase database. Contact me to be able to internally test the platform or go ahead and download our application on the Amazon Alexa.
Next Steps
If this project is continued or sees an expanded user base, the following changes can be made:
- Have categories for improvement in feedback when ending session for further scope of improvement for users.
- Can further gamify the app with music and sound effects.
- Ability to change speed of speech in questions would be great as per user feedback.
- Improving accessibility through creating a UI component for the app which would show closed captions.
- Ability to save questions that user gets wrong to learn later in the citizenship test category to not miss a single question.
Reflection
This trivia application was created to increase civics awareness across a wider audience within America and I hope to see this unravel, specially in the currently fast changing political and global environment. I hope this helps our users and we can make Civics engaging for them.
Being my first design project with a client, I had a lot of fun and got to learn audio based UI/UX skills. Collaborating with developers and seeing a project from the designer perspective instead of developer for the first time was very interesting and made me value good team work much more.
Gratitude
Thank you so much to my fellow teammates, design mentors, and partners for a successful first project in Dali lab!
Thank you for reading :)
