Primary Research
Interviews
Unfair workplace environments often arise through micro-level judgments that accumulate over time, such as whose ideas are heard and whose performance is perceived as more credible. We conduct initial research based on workspace bias and cognitive cues through expert interviews and focus group studies.
Serious Game / Product Design
Work Hard, Play Hard is a board game designed to surface the subtle dynamics of implicit bias in professional environments. Since workplace judgments are often triggered by trivial, surface-level cues, the game embeds these stereotypes into core mechanics: players navigate challenges influenced by arbitrary attributes like footwear, hair length, or communication style.
As a team, we analyzed interview responses from professionals with extensive experience in workplace dynamics and managing complex interpersonal conflicts. By listening to stories from diverse industries, we found that:
We employed the "New Metaphor" research method to quantify subjective experiences of complex workplace dynamics with our focus groups. By asking participants to align specific visual metaphors with 4 concepts related to gender bias in the workplace setting, we were able to map out implicit attitudes and deeper psychological associations in a structured, consistent, and highly engaging format.
Interviewee B,
English Professor, 24 years of teaching experiences
“Look at things like salaries, perqs, office sizes or locations, work loads. Try to find some objective measure of quality and see if those things are equal across groups, that should be the measure of equaitable workspace for me”
Interviewee A,
Design Director, 25+ years of enterprise experience
“The best thing to do is to take no actions because you do not if the would like other people to talk about her being biased in the workspace. You can reach out to them if they really needs it. ”
Focus Group Studies
These patterns suggest that participants tended to understand workplace experiences through everyday concrete metaphors that conveyed breaking, moving, fitting, and growing. Our research identified three foundational mental models that shape how employees navigate their roles:
e.g. Broken pencil leads, doorbells or knockers
e.g. balance acts, fitting things around each other
e.g. highpoints in a landscape, waiting rooms, signposts
Experience Spectrum from visual metaphor trends
The Clarity Zone
The Friction Zone
Fragility
Agency
Constraint
Empowerment
Training builds awareness, but effectiveness varies.
Support privately, respect autonomy.
Safety Rooted in Minds: Equitable workspace = psychological safety
Practical Advocacy:
Equity stems from trasnparency
Core Concept
[Confidence in contributing ideas]
[Workplace performance feedback]
[Feeling interrupted vs. heard]
[Onboarding training]
Group 1:
6 people (5 female+ 1 male), all ages 22-27,
3 current employees and 3 graduate students.
Group 2:
4 people (2 female + 2 male), all ages 22-28, 1 current employee and 3 graduate students.
Communication as a Fragile Exchange
Interactions, specifically interruptions, are perceived through metaphors of "breakage" or "intrusion", revealing that feeling heard is deeply tied to psychological safety.
Performance & Confidence in “Balancing”
Employees frequently view idea contribution and feedback through metaphors of balancing or fitting in. This indicates that professional confidence is often moderated by the need to navigate social norms and implicit group expectations.
Onboarding as a Navigational Journey
New hires experience onboarding as a transitional, often anxious, space highlighting a critical need for structured guidance and clear "signposts" to mitigate uncertainty.
Research
Takeaway
Secondary Research
Following our primary research, we look into focused psychological studies and existing products in the market to develop our design strategy and define our product possibilities.
Prototype & Testing
Implicit bias is defined as the “prejudice in favor of or against a person or group that functions outside of conscious attentional focus”.
(Gutierrez et al., 2014, p.317)
Embedded Design
Intermixing / Obfuscation
We utilized obfuscation by wrapping our deeper design goal within the structure of a “brainstorming party game”.
By intermixing on-topic challenge cards (which introduce bias-related constraints), we ensure players remained immersed and open to insights without defensiveness.
Dual-Process Model
These cue associations are activated rapidly and become especially influential under conditions like time pressure and ambiguous information, where people rely on heuristics rather than deliberative reasoning.
(Kahneman, 2011)
System 1/2 Thinking
System 1 Thinking: We intentionally used rapid-fire pitching and social pressure to force players into quick, heuristic-based judgments during the game.
System 2 Thinking: We utilized a structured reflection phase to force players to pause, analyze, and articulate why certain interactions felt unfair, successfully bridging the gap between automatic bias and conscious correction.
Design Strategy
Theory
Concepts
Application
With that, we define our persuasive aim——to create a low-threat and playful experience in which players naturally notice the unfairness of stereotype-based evaluations. To execute this strategy, we chose a tabletop board game format. Card games naturally facilitate obfuscation through hidden roles and intermixing through diverse deck mechanics, creating the 'low-threat' environment necessary for our persuasive goals.
Existing Products
Round 1 Prototype
We create our initial prototype ‘Spotlight’ which convey the sense of “being spotlighted”. A host will set the pitch topic with a Prompt Card about its content and a Challenge Card about specific constraints. Individuals will write their pitches and give them to the host, which the Host performs for anonymous voting using Spotlight flags.
We have renamed our game Work Hard, Play Hard to ensure the player understands our main focus in workspace anti-bias practices. In this phase, we refined our game systems to be a more engaging solution that improves communication and bias training.
We have iterated our solution into a high-fidelity prototype that integrates our desired visuals into detailed prompts and instructions, we also setup character cards with cartoon-style workers that allow player quickly understand their role and main tasks.
Round 2 Prototype
We referenced other card games like The Resistance: Avalon and Werewolf, where we incorporate the side quest and traitor mechanics to enable players fully immerse in our games with more tensions.
Round 1 Internal Playtest online
We ran a small internal playtest with four players split into two teams (Red and Blue). Each round used the same prompt card (“Name the world’s next viral snack”), a shared challenge card requiring players to “include a cat somehow,” and different voice-style cards (depressed, lazy, LLM-like assertive)
Main Problem We See:
The main issues with the game mechanism appeared during pitching & voting stages.
First, everyone tended to vote for themselves and could influence others’ decisions.
The order of the pitches made a difference: people often held their votes early on, and tended to vote for later ideas.
There were not many moments for discussion as players tended to think and vote individually, which could reduce the persuasive effect.
How We Solve it:
The main issues with the game mechanism appeared during pitching & voting stages.
Change the voice cards to identity or character cards, which contain same function but blurs people’s attention on “voices”.
Setup the pitch order based on the character card to make the whole game process more natural.
Refine challenge and side quest card that enable plays actively think and engage in the game with strategy.
Game Assets Design (Character, Prompt, Challenge, Side Quest Cards)
Initial ‘Spotlight’ Card Designs
Gender bias in the workplace is rarely overt; it is an invisible pressure that forces employees to constantly "fit" themselves into existing structures. Our research demonstrates that creating an equitable workplace requires more than policy—it requires designing transparent, supportive processes that normalize diverse perspectives and reduce the cognitive load of "fitting in".
Gameplay Guide
Realization
A Creative Pitch + Office Character Roleplaying Game
Design
All card types follow an unified visual language using constrained palette, minimal shapes and
simplified iconography. The prompt and challenge cards use category colors only to support
gameplay legibility, not to imply difficulty, emotional tone, or moral weight. The game board,
voting board, and flags also adopt the same constrained color scheme and clean typographic
hierarchy to reinforce a coherent, unbiased system, avoiding color-coded associations with
performance or emotional biases
Game Assets Design
Final Playtest with CMU HCII faculties
Marketing
The strategy aims to minimize psychological reactance among young professionals entering the workforce by positioning the game as a creative-pitch icebreaker rather than a diversity training tool. Having established an Amazon selling page to reach a broad consumer base, the next step involves evaluating sales data and implementing a B2B strategy to sell to diverse industries. This will allow us to explore the possibility to develop a specialized "Enterprise Edition" that tailors the obfuscated challenges and character roles to specific corporate sectors.
