Dec 2016 - Aug 2022
Kucheza
Summary
Kucheza is a Dutch company founded with the goal of providing playful learning to entrepreneurs across the globe. Their product, ‘Farming Forward’, is a game in which players are asked to make financial and operational decisions in a simulation of their own context. The game is a framework of various agronomical and service systems, so that multiple scenarios are easily created.
During my time at Kucheza, I was responsible for:
- Researching requirements & interview field experts
- Formulating user stories and acceptance criteria
- Designing, implementing & testing new systems
- Creating game assets
- Producing marketing materials; documents, infographics, motion graphics, videos and websites.
Details
- Active in 10+ countries
- 500+ players across the world
- 7 unique game modes (Horticulture, Dairy, Poultry, Apiculture, Retail, Transport, Contracting)
- Visit their website →
Promotional video of Kucheza’s activities.
Background
I was present when the original briefing was held at Monkeybizniz, the game company where I did part time work. Two lawyers with a deep passion for playful learning asked them to create a game in which the player performs agronomical steps while learning about financial topics. The game would serve as a training environment, so that real-life farmers can experiment with different business-decisions without the repercussions.
Together with Monkeybizniz I helped figure out what Kucheza was after, and how to best translate their challenge to game principles.
A few years later I was contacted by Kucheza to help extend the content of Monkeybizniz’ game and to provide general support. In the meantime, they were busy making their own in-house game ‘Farming Forward’. As a freelancer, I was gradually getting involved in the early design decisions and helped create assets.
In 2018 I took over the main design role for ‘Farming Forward’, which gave me the opportunity to design many new features (as a result of a major refactoring of the backend) and create new assets using a new 3D pipeline.
3D motion graphic I made to help promote Farming Forward.
Research
Over the years I’ve led the design process for many different clients, each with their own unique requirements. I first started a preliminary research round, interviewing field experts in order to understand the subject matter and core issues we had to address.
After gathering most of the contextual information, I wrote user stories and discussed their priorities with our Business department. I extended these user stories with Acceptance Criteria, and tested my assumptions with our clients and field experts. The Acceptance Criteria were then discussed with our front- and backend developers, after which they could prepare the implementation of the suggested functionality.
Photos of a new system I was prototyping, in which players need to balance the social standings with other (sometimes opposing) businesses in the game.
Production
While the Tech team was busy translating user stories to diagrams, I took my whiteboard and drew (very rough) flowcharts and wireframes of the new interface elements. I came up with various alternatives, criticizing them and proposing suggestions to the team.
Prototyping
At this point I also started creating digital prototypes, which help to communicate the proposed flow better. Earlier on I used Invision for this purpose, but I found Adobe XD to be a faster way to visualize functionality while using repeatable assets.
These prototypes were critiqued internally and sometimes shown to field experts to get their opinion on the general usability and content-specific accuracy. After some iterations these prototypes were used by our Front-end developers to build the features in Unity.
Game art
Another part of the production process was to create new 2D- and 3D-assets to fit the environment of the player better. This meant doing research on contextual buildings, animals, vegetation and other objects. The research gave me a solid point of reference, so that the end result was something the player could relate to.
Configuration
When the systems were built, I did some final configuration work in Unity. Using ‘Scriptable Objects’, I created new items, businesses and characters to populate the new game world.
Implementation
‘Farming Forward’ was frequently used in training sessions all over the world. These training sessions were held by my employers, and I was often asked to introduce the game to different audiences. I also monitored their behavior in ‘Farming Forward’, giving me extremely valuable feedback on what to improve. I once had the privilege of attending an on-site training session in the northern parts of South Africa. Seeing the game in action was a great reminder who we’re really working for.
Conclusion
‘Farming Forward’ was an absolute blast to work on. The varied clients meant that I never fell into a comfort zone, pushing my limits and remaining critical of the work done. With each client, I learned a lot about various UX principles and how to make ‘Farming Forward’ more user friendly for digital illiterate people.
Some key take-aways:
- Users first: it’s easy to get ‘lost’ in the minute details of how an interface element should look, but at the end of the day there is a hard-working farmer who is asked to interact with new software on tablets they haven’t used a lot.
- Learning objectives > complexity: while talking to field experts is fun, you can easily get lost in the endless depth of their expertise. Making clear decisions on what to build and (more importantly) what to simplify, will ultimately benefit the user’s experience a lot.
- Stability over features: over the course of many years we’ve tried out different ways to brief desired functionality to each other. We found that involving Tech with the formulation of user stories works really well for setting expectations for all involved.
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