After evaluating the first prototype with two persons, I had to put the evaluations on hold already. Turns out the first testers revealed the same fundamental issues with the prototype. I figured it would be better to solve those mentioned issues first in order to continue with the evaluations. That’s how the second prototype came to be.
The following material makes a comparison between the first and second prototype and provides a reasoning behind the changes between the two. As you may remember from the previous blog post, the prototype features a general team overview and role specific comparisons. To be clear, the second prototype is on the right.
General team overview
Gold difference
The temporal gold difference graph was drawn up a bit too minimally to be clear enough. The X axis now specifies that the rightmost point represents the current point in time whereas the leftmost point is 10 minutes ago. Values were added next to the horizontal help lines so that users can estimate gold differences along the whole X axis more precisely.
A little mouse icon was added above the graph to indicate that the default 10 minute interval is adjustable by the user by scrolling or dragging.
The two different shades of the team colours representing the difference between gold earned and gold spent were found to be way too confusing to grasp on top of the temporal and differential aspect of the graph. Therefore, they have been removed so there is only one shade of each team colour present.
Gold
Let’s start of with the fact that the hate for pie charts is real. Although I kind of knew this beforehand, along with the reasons why, I thought to myself that in this case it could serve its purpose. On top of that, I really like circles! Too bad for them, there’s no place for prioritizing aesthetics over clarity here. A fundamental problem with the design of the first prototype was that the gold distribution isn’t that realistically portrayed. As you can see in the second prototype, which uses the real data from the game at that point, the different amounts of gold are actually quite close. If we would adapt the pie charts of the first prototype with these values, they would more or less look like evenly cut pies that gave you a hard time to choose the largest piece from as a child.
At least we can always revert to good old bar charts. They allow the users to estimate differences between players way more precisely and due to their configuration in the second prototype also allow a comparison between players of different teams. Since these bar charts don’t display temporal or differential data, the difference between gold earned and gold spent is added here, again represented with different shades. The visualisation also provides the current difference in gold earned and gold spent between the two teams next to little icons and indicates with a little arrow which team is ahead in each aspect. A disadvantage is that the roles of each player aren’t that clear anymore. This can be solved by displaying the role information on hovering the mouse over the specific bars.
Damage
For the sake of consistency, the damage visualisation has taken the same form as the gold visualisation. The period over which the damage is accumulated is displayed right under the header of the visualisation so users don’t have to guess what the word recent exactly means. The difference in damage between the two teams is split up in the difference in physical and magic damage.
Vulnerability
The vulnerability visualisation led to some confusion of the testers as well. The first prototype didn’t include that much information so I should’ve seen that one coming. After some clarification, the testers suggested that it would be useful to also display the factors from which the vulnerability score is calculated. Thus, the second prototype provides the three most influencing factors next to the champion portraits. More information about each of these factors and vulnerability itself is available by hovering over the specific icons.
Role specific comparison
Gold
The same reasoning applies here as for the gold visualisation in the general team overview. The base amount of gold that every players receives, i.e. starting gold and passively generated gold, is not displayed as a bar but rather in text right under the header of the visualisation. Some preliminary icons are provided for the different gold sources. Again, information about these sources is available by hovering over these icons.
Pathing
On top of having just the recent pathing of the jungler illustrated on the map, the specific timings could come in handy as well. The user can now switch between the original map view and a new sequence view displayed below.
Evaluation
That’s it for the second prototype! Now it’s time to see if the adjustments will make for a better understanding of the prototype by the new testers.