Research — Gabriella Thompson

Research

Our research process involved a literature review of gamification in coding education, a competitive analysis of competitor applications, and eight interviews with potential users of our app to understand their needs and concerns about learning how to code.

Literature Review

The insights we gathered through our literature review supported gamification as an effective approach to coding education, highlighting its value to increase performance, self-efficacy, engagement, and motivation. Gamification is particularly valuable for our target users as it can reduce syntax issues that tend to trouble novice programmers.

Competitive Analysis

We examined the strengths and weaknesses of nine competitor products to understand the current market of gamified coding tools. For easy comprehension, we gathered our research into the following visual.
Competitive Analysis Dashboard Pt.2
Competitive Analysis Dashboard Pt.1

User Interviews

We conducted interviews with eight adults who have an interest in coding to understand the challenges and concerns that impact their decision to pursue a coding education. We also identified the elements of digital learning that they found to be effective. These insights were organized into an affinity map (shown below).

The key findings from our user interviews were:

Career value, social motivation, and intrinsic goals were main reasons for wanting to code
Participants noted the high difficulty level and being unsure of where to start as key frustrations when attempting to learn coding

Participants with prior digital learning experience valued diverse content, repitition, flexible structure, and interactivity in the course structure
In their coding education, participants wanted: simplified coding concepts, familiar interfaces, incentivization, and accessibility/convenience

Our team reviewed the affinity map and met to brainstorm features we wanted to include in the game. We each spent five minutes writing down our ideas, and then we came together to discuss. We categorized each idea into a four quadrant matrix to determine the effort and impact level of each feature.

Four-quadrant Matrix

Affinity Map

Feature Brainstorming

Persona 1

Persona 2

Anti-Persona

To accompany our user research, we created personas that depicted potential users and use case scenarios. These artifacts helped us define the goal of our app and focus areas.