Goals:

• Verify assumptions:
• It will be clear that the users can't stand on the ground
• The users will make a connection between the color of the lights in the room and the color of the holds, associating a red-lit room with the red rock wall holds
• Test open questions:
• Will the lights in secondary colors clearly corrolate with a combination of their two secondary colors?

Procedure:

I printed-out mock ups of the room and created small models of the walls, with the anticipated rock spacing. I then verbally walked guests through our current storyboard, recording their actions and thoughts as they went. After they were thrown out of the room, I asked why they thought this was the case. At the end, I ran through the mistakes they had made to better understand why the layout of the room didn't make the rules initially clear. Some of the confusion they had is intentional in our design (e.g. immediately understanding how secondary colors are mapped), but understanding the confusion can help us increase or decrease the room's difficulty (e.g. the arrangement or number of holds on the wall).

Outcome:

Target Metrics:

• 3-5 attempts to win, or ~ 25% success rate
• 2-3 minutes to complete the puzzle
• Difficult on the first attempt

Results:

• None of the users tested succeeded on the first try
• Most succeeded within three tries, for a success rate of 37.5%
• The room's theming was clear and inuitive for all users

Issues:

• 75% of users mentioned anticipating needing to climb to the top of the wall or asked about following a paticular path (as in traditional rock climbing)
• 50% didn't think to stand on the ledge, and an additional 25% didn't think to ensure that all teammates were on the ledge

Takeaways:

• Ensure that the holds are spread wide rather than tall, to make it clear the the goal is to hold on, rather than climb to the top of the wall
• Make the ledge wide enough that the guests will clearly see the need to stand on it, and be disinclined to try to climb too high
• The success rate is currently a little high. Current user testing was done with a scale model of the room, so the success rate will fall when the physical challenge is integrated. We are close to our anticiapted success rate, though, so function of secondary colors is as intuitive as we had hoped

Further Testing:

• Future user testing will be done at the scale of a real wall in the room, so we can begin to finalize the spacing of the holds on the wall and their hand-feel
• Now that the inutiveness of secondary colors has been proven, we will test whether we want to require that all users are touching an equal number of each component color, or whether we just want to check that there aren't any hands on the wrong color