The “Playernation” is one of the biggest gaming festivals in England, garnering people from all over the world to experience the event first hand hoping to unite gamers of all types, play styles and genres over their common interests. The festival is infamous for giving indie game developers a chance to prosper and kickstart their full-time careers in the industry by allowing their games and published personal projects to be all be equals alongside the “triple A” titles. Gaming is a very broad hobby that can easily be indulged in by anyone, which widens the target demographic by an enormous margin and due to that, extra precautions have to be taken in order to make the festival accessible for a very wide range of audiences. However, surveying attendees makes it possible to create user archetypes which can be used in creating user profiles to generalise the types of attendees that are to be expected.
In order to make it practical and reach user needs, the website needs the following features as a minimal requirement (keeping in mind that all of these should have the capability of being completed quickly and efficiently regardless of the user’s technological literacy):
- Ability to create/log into an account
- Ability to purchase tickets
- Display the date, time and location of the festival
- Show arranged parking and hotels
- Locate where you can buy food and drinks
- Show a map/demonstrate the layout of the festival
Surveying attendees has brought in these results: the general shared fear is the user not being able to navigate the festival effectively leading to them not being able to achieve their personal goals.
This problem space applies both to the festival itself as well the festival website, since this gives insight on the competency and navigation skills of the attendees. Knowing this about the attendees makes it more apparent which features should be most focused on in order to achieve the bare minimum result (finding information, finding tickets, buying tickets and receiving purchase confirmation).
References.
- Thenec.co.uk. (2024). Insomnia the Gaming Festival #i72. [online] Available at: https://www.thenec.co.uk/whats-on/insomnia-the-gaming-festival-i72/.