*Catcher*-centered design - how the community is shaping Stall Catchers

by Egle (seplute)

Recently, our colleagues at UCL asked us for examples on how we have used user feedback in shaping our project and our game - Stall Catchers. Well, I think it's safe to say they probably regret asking, because the list we gave them was looong! 😜

We're sharing it here with you as well:

  1. early on, before the launch of Stall Catchers, we ran a ThinkCamp session at the ECSA 2016 conference. The community members there were a major help, they came up with the name "Stall Catchers", helped us with the thinking with regards to the "WeCureALZ --> EyesOnALZ" rebrand that we were considering, suggested several features, including never ending levels & others, and most importantly - gave us accessibility tips, as we were keen on involving seniors & Alzheimer's patients.

Here's the email-report I sent one of the organizers of the ThinkCamp, Margaret Gold (we didn't even have a blog back then to share this!!)


Pietro later also added that:

The only thing I would add to what Egle wrote is the general observation that the ThinkCamp had a huge beneficial impact on our project across many dimensions - a testament to the preparation, participants, and format. I hope we can do it again this year!

  1. we did alpha testing with a small group of people - Alzheimer's disease club at Cornell and other project partners and our sponsors the BrightFocus Foundation. They gave us lots of feedback including how to best see the vessels and what kind of information they would like to see on the interface (like more personal stats), much of which we incorporated.

  1. we keep track of users' suggestions on the forum, and document all of them in the features channel on our team's slack workspace. We then create GitHub issues for each of them & they get considered in our main feature pipeline. So far we've implemented several things, like changing the color of the outline (the suggestion came from the catchers after Stall Catchers was released); increasing the frequency of "Redeem" events, which makes it more fun for superusers; we also created a major one - a live chatbox that many users have been asking for - we haven't released it yet, but it's coming soon.

  2. we ran the "Opening data" session at Mozfest 2017 where we did not just gather feedback about how and what kind of data people would like to access from Stall Catchers, but also interface changes, such as creating a research speedometer and more. We still haven't written this up, but will soon!!

  3. we recently held a focus session at Lake Hazel Middle School with students to brainstorm new features, which included creating a "school" mode in Stall Catchers, adding a "game within a game" to fight boredom & make it more fun, increasing the frequency of competitions, such as 1 week long competition per month (the students LOVE competitions!!), ability to compete with rival schools in a future "schools" competition in Stall Catchers, enabling avatars that can be dressed up & accessorized by purchasing items with currency gained while playing the game, and more !!! (they had TONS of ideas, according to Pietro, who met with the students in person recently to give them the first ever Stall Catchers award!)

Told you it was a long list! 😅 To conclude I might have said...

Thanks to all the community feedback that we received since the beginning of EyesOnALZ, we now have more ideas that we can count! And the luxury to choose from a long list while planning new features... 😊

Keep telling us what you want & need on our forum!

--- Keep sharing your ideas, questions & suggestions with us! Whether related to EyesOnALZ, [Stall Catchers](https://stallcatchers.com/main), Alzheimer's disease or citizen science in general. You can do so on [our forum](http://forum.eyesonalz.com/), and also always reach us at [info@eyesonalz.com](mailto:info@stallcatchers.com).