Presentation final interface:

'About Time' is a board game about three historical characters detached from their timelines. By answering themed questions and collecting artefacts the players can reach the centre portal and return home.

This interface connects gamers to Europeana in a seamless and enjoyable way. The characters, questions and artefacts are based on information that we gathered from Europeana's website.

1 — Who are you designing for?

The target group is 'gamers', but we mainly focus on instances involving gamers. Think of family homes with teenage children, or classrooms consistent of some gamers. We want to make it so that learning about Europeana's content is fun and engaging, which can be difficult for someone used to high interaction, like video games.

2 — What is their relation to the collection?

Gamers often learn about history inside video games, often even European history. So, there's definitely interest enough. Main thing is that gamers learn through demanding interaction, required of active participation.

3 — Which content are you interfacing?

Europeana's website; more specifically their collections and stories.

4 — How does the 'interface' affect or influence the 'user'?

The interface persuades or tricks the user(s) to learn about European history by making it more engaging to them through interactivity.

5 — What type of interaction is fitting for this?

Utilising some type of objective or competition would attract gamers greatly. Making it engaging to this type of user means to directly involve them. The interaction would involve multiple users.

6 — What type of medium is fitting for this?

A somewhat classical board/card game would be fitting. It could be played inside a classroom or played after a family dinner. This way the product is also left accessible to anyone interested in it, outside of our targeted user(s).

7 — Which visual language (including typography) can be useful or fitting for this?

Since we're working with a character system, there has to be some type of distinction within colour. All needs to be quickly identifiable and easy to the eyes. Our user testing showed that people quickly get confused in where to look and what information exactly to process.

8 — What are you trying to accomplish through the interface you want to design?

To make learning about Europeana’s content fun and easy to our user(s).

The game manual introduces some flavour text, states the rules, and provides the answers to the question cards.

The manual's design is based on the three characters created - Herbalist, Infantry Soldier and Olympic Runner. All three colours are used in the game itself, to mark the question cards and artifacts.

About Time, board design.
Representing all character colours, and their backgrounds are portrayed in the corners.

About Time, deck holder.
The deck holder should help organise all the different types of cards.

About Time, cards.
The question and artifact cards consists of specific questions to the character. All of these cards are based on different collections, stories or items from Europeana's website.