Project
X-RAW: Board Game
Designed for Accenture Song workshops, X-RAW is a detective-style board game that helps clients and new designers understand UX principles by investigating broken digital experiences and identifying violated design laws.
Year
2024
Duration
16 WEEKS
Game Design
Education
Goal: Solving UX Crimes Through Play
The goal of this project was to design an engaging awareness tool for clients and new studio members at Accenture Song that introduces fundamental UX principles in an accessible and memorable way. Instead of relying on traditional presentations, onboarding decks, or theoretical explanations, the intention was to create a hands-on experience that would help participants understand the real impact of UX decisions on digital products. The format needed to be interactive, collaborative, and intuitive enough for people without a design background while still meaningful for designers beginning their UX journey.
To achieve this, the project explored the idea of learning through play. By transforming UX principles into an activity-driven experience, the aim was to encourage curiosity, discussion, and discovery. The solution needed to simplify complex UX laws into relatable building blocks while creating an engaging format that could be used repeatedly in workshops, internal sessions, and client conversations.
Impact:
👍 Adopted across multiple studio workshops and client engagement sessions
👍 Received strong positive feedback from participants
From Abstract Concepts to Playable Interactions
The process began with exploring how learning and gameplay could intersect. We benchmarked board games, studied UX laws and principles, and analyzed different gameplay techniques to understand how engagement and retention could be built into the experience. Through multiple concept explorations, we arrived at a storyline where players investigate a broken website to uncover a violated UX law.
Designing the gameplay required translating abstract UX concepts into tangible interactions. We started by defining the building blocks—game elements, player actions, and outcomes—and evaluated each idea against two key questions: does it meaningfully teach UX, and is it engaging enough to replay? One of the biggest challenges was ensuring that the game remained interesting beyond the first play, as traditional mystery formats tend to lose their appeal once solved.
This led to a critical shift in the design. Instead of a fixed narrative, we created a system where each game introduces a different, randomly violated UX law. Players are always stepping into an unknown scenario, ensuring freshness and replayability while keeping the learning intact.
By deconstructing design into fundamental experience elements and mapping them to real-world features, players move from identifying surface issues to understanding underlying causes, gradually building an intuitive grasp of how digital experiences function.
Breaking Down Complexity Into Intuition
The breakthrough came from rethinking how UX laws are structured. Instead of presenting them as standalone principles, we broke each law down into fundamental experience tags—cognition, memory, space, time, effort, and more. These tags became the core gameplay tools, mapped to real-life product features that players could analyze and interact with.
This approach allowed players to move from identifying surface-level issues to understanding underlying causes. By repeatedly encountering these tags across different scenarios, participants began to recognize patterns in how UX principles influence user behavior. The game subtly shifts learning from conscious effort to intuitive recognition, where players start associating design decisions with their real-world impact.
With the core structure in place, the focus shifted to testing and refinement. As a distributed, pan-India team, we began by simulating gameplay on virtual platforms using low-fidelity setups to validate the core experience. These early iterations helped us quickly identify gaps in clarity, engagement, and flow.
We then moved into physical prototyping, creating paper versions of the game and conducting multiple playtests across locations. Each session provided insights into how players interacted with the system—what confused them, what excited them, and where the experience needed simplification. These learnings shaped the evolution of the game, helping us strike the right balance between complexity and accessibility.
The gameplay was eventually distilled into a cohesive system consisting of three card decks, a board, scoring coins, and a time tracker. This balance of elements ensured that the game remained engaging without becoming overwhelming. Interestingly, the final flow began to mirror the design process itself—players gather insights, build understanding, earn trust, and work toward a resolution within a time constraint.
Through continuous prototyping and playtesting across locations, the game evolved into a balanced system where simplicity, engagement, and learning intersect, ensuring that each interaction meaningfully contributes to both gameplay and understanding.
Blending the drama of crime thrillers with the vibrancy of Indian truck art, the visual identity creates an immersive experience that feels bold, expressive, and culturally grounded while reinforcing the narrative of investigation and discovery.
Crafting a Distinctive, Culturally Rooted Identity
In parallel with gameplay, we explored a visual identity that could bring the experience to life. The goal was to capture the drama of crime thrillers while grounding the game in a distinctly Indian aesthetic. Through moodboarding and visual exploration, we discovered strong parallels between retro crime posters and Indian truck art—both expressive, bold, and unapologetically dramatic.
Truck art became the foundation of the visual language, bringing in vibrant colors, hand-painted textures, and a sense of personality. This was layered with detective-inspired motifs such as badges, stars, insignias, sharp edges, and symbolic markers that evoke authority and investigation. The typography leaned toward bold, high-contrast styles that amplified the sense of urgency and intrigue.
The result was a visual system that felt immersive and memorable—one that not only supported the narrative but also stood out as a unique blend of cultural expression and storytelling.
From Game to Studio-Wide Adoption
Once developed, X-RAW was introduced across the studio through interactive sessions and showcases. What started as an experimental learning tool quickly evolved into a widely adopted format for workshops and client engagements. The hands-on nature of the experience encouraged participation, sparked discussions, and made UX principles more approachable for non-design audiences.
Over time, the impact became evident in how participants engaged with UX conversations. The game created a shared language, enabling teams to discuss design decisions with greater clarity and confidence. More importantly, it shifted perception—UX was no longer seen as abstract theory, but as something tangible, observable, and directly tied to product success.
