The Coven

OVERVIEW

For a Persuasive Design course, my team and I were passionate about creating a tool that helps women reduce self-bias and strengthen leadership traits. We decided to focus on improving people's negotiation skills, more precisely, women's attitude towards negotiation. 

Through this project, I learned a lot on gender and self biases.

ROLE

Product Designer

METHODS

Embedded Design
Game Design
Playtesting
Rapid Prototyping

TIMELINE

Sep. 2019 - Dec. 2019

TEAM MEMBERS

Emily Yang (Me)
Lauren Whittingham
Lorraine Zhang
Neha Chopade
Stephanie Wang

In addition to gender biases, research has shown that women continue to earn less, on average, for the same performance, because they don't ask for it. One of the reasons women don't advocate effectively for themselves is that their fear of harming their relationship with the negotiator.

It utilizes embedded design and gameplay techniques to reframe the concept of negotiation. Instead of prescribing abstract guidance on negotiating, it uses the immersive experience of a light-hearted game to empower women to see that starting a negotiation is not as daunting as they think.

Some of the problems we found were being too critical on oneself, having imposter syndrome or not knowing how to negotiate for one's salary, etc.

We drafted an ideal persona and a self-schema map, highlighting the key associations a first-time female employee could have on their job in a tech company. By identifying what our persona would like to strengthen in their self-schema, we reached a consensus to focus on improving negotiation.

After narrowing our design scope, we spoke to Linda Babcock, a CMU professor who is an expert on negotiations and dispute resolution.

We wanted to learn the negotiating techniques she taught in her workshops and draw inferences to design our intervention mechanics. However, after talking to Linda, we realized that instead of focusing on improving women's negotiation skills,

We arrived at this conclusion because we learned that,

• Women self-advocate less not due to their skill level in negotiation, but because of other barriers that are self-imposed or enforced by gender stereotypes

• Women often make fewer requests out of fear of harming their relationship with the would-be negotiation partner.

We chose to embed our persuasive intent in a game because when a prosocial issue is explicitly presented, it could result in counter-effects. It could trigger people's psychological defenses and reduce engagement.

Therefore, when designing the game, we exercised two key embedded design strategies that we learned from our professor, Geoff Kaufman: intermixing and distancing.

• We intermixed our "on-topic" and "off-topic" game content to make the focal message less obvious and more accessible 

• We created a distance, "a buffer," between players and the uncomfortable themes that our game is exploring by setting the theme agnostic to gender and away from a workplace setting

Using Action Card to Encourage Trade

We also noticed that some players are hesitant to trade because they are more risk-averse. Since they are not negotiating as often as we would like, we took the chance cards from monopoly and adapted them to action cards to encourage trading. These action cards also make the game more exciting.

Assist Shy Players with Interest Card

Shy players can feel uncomfortable speaking up during the game, especially when multiple players were interested in a trade. This can put them in a disadvantaged position. Therefore to encourage them to speak up, we added an interest card allowing players to show interest without talking over each others.

Reduce Player’s Ability to Count Cards

Originally, it was too easy for players to deduce another player's potion card as players could inherently count cards and identify the leading player's missing resources. This behavior not only reduced trading activities but also cornered the winning player. We improved this problem by changing the total ingredient count a player needs to win the game.

In The Coven, players are tasked with creating a potion, each requiring a different combination of ingredients that is hidden from the other players.

Players take turns rolling for resources, diamonds, and chance cards. Players' ingredients and diamonds are openly displayed, allowing other players to identify where resources they need lie. They use what they earn from rolls to trade with other players and become the first person to collect all the ingredients to make their potion. While chance plays a part in how quickly players are able to reach their goal, making favorable trades and being an effective negotiator plays a large part in the players' success.