Prototyping an app to assist game-based activities: co-design using a qualitative approach

Abstract

Qualitative approaches have gained prominence in the scientific community being important to develop studies that use them, namely to assist prototyping stages. This article seeks to contribute to the deepening of knowledge in the field of cataloging and evaluating educational games and describes the process of designing an application's wireframes. This allowed the gathering of the app’s functional requirements, using a qualitative methodological approach through co-design: a focus group of eight experts from different fields such as geography, sociology, science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics was constituted. Considering the Communicative Design Paradigm and the Octalysis gamification model, the functional requirements were grouped, after analysis, into six domains – Games, News, Interaction, User, Evaluation and Language. The prototype design emerged from this process enabling the design of 47 wireframes.