mirror of https://github.com/dirtbags/moth.git
80 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
80 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
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Frequently Asked Questions
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=================
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I should probably move this somewhere else,
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since most of it is about
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Main Application Questions
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=====================
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## Can we add some instructions to the user interface? It's confusing.
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The lack of instruction was a deliberate design decision made about 9 years ago
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when we found in A/B testing that college students are a lot more motivated by
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vague instruction and mystery than precise instruction. We've since found that
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people who are inclined to "play" our events are similarly motivated by
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weirdness and mystery: they enjoy fiddling around with things until they've
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worked it out experimentally.
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Oddly, the group who seems to be the most perturbed by the vagueness is
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professionals. This may be because many of these folks spend long amounts of
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time trying to make things accessible and precise, and this looks like a train
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wreck from that perspective.
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Another way to think about it: this is supposed to be a game, like Super Mario
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Brothers. We were very careful about designing the puzzles so that you could
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learn by playing. The whimsical design is meant to make it feel like trying
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things out will not result in a catastrophic failure anywhere, and we've found
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that most people figure it out very quickly without any instruction at all,
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despite feeling a little confused or disoriented at first.
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## Why can't I choose my team from a list when I log in?
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We actually started this way, but we quickly learned that there were exploitable
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attack avenues available when any participant can join any team. One individual
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in 2010, having a bad day, decided to enter every answer they had, for every
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team in the contest, as a way of sabotaging the event. It worked: everyone's
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motivation to try and solve puzzles tanked, and people were angry that they'd
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been working on content only to find that they already had the points.
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## Why won't you add this helpful text to the login page?
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It has been our experience that the more words we have on that page, the less
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likely any of them will be read. We strive now to have no instruction at all,
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and to design the interface in a way that it's obvious what you have to do.
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## Why aren't we providing a link to the scoreboard?
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It's because the scoreboard looks horrible on a mobile phone:
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it was designed for a projector.
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Once we have a scoreboard that is readable on mobile,
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I'll add that link.
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## Why can't we show a list of teams to log in to?
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At a previous event,
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we had a participant log in as other teams and solve every puzzle,
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because they were upset about something.
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This ruined the event for everyone,
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because it took away the challenge of scoring points.
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Scoreboard Questions
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=================
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## Why are there no links or title on the scoreboard?
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The scoreboard is supposed to be projected at events, to participants. The current scoreboard isn't something we intend participants to pull up on their mobile devices or laptops.
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Think of the scoreboard as sort of like the menu screens at Burger King.
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## Will you change the scoreboard color scheme?
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The scoreboard colors and layout were carefully chosen to be distinguishable for
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all forms of color blindness, and even accessible by users with total blindness
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using screen readers. This is why we decided to put the category name inside the
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bar and just deal with it being a little weird.
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I'm open to suggestions, but they need to work for all users.
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