For my project, I created an interactive maze game where the player controls Minnie Mouse using two potentiometers connected to an Arduino. The maze appears on the screen, and the player must guide Minnie through it without touching the walls. The player collects items such as cheese, stars, and hearts, which trigger a yellow LED and a pickup sound. Hitting a wall turns on a red LED and plays a bump sound, and reaching Mickey at the end lights a green LED and plays a happy sound.
For user testing, I asked my sister to try the game. She immediately noticed that Minnie did not move smoothly. Instead of following the potentiometer movements, the character would jump or move to random parts of the maze. Even when she moved the knobs slowly, the character keeps moving as if it was lagged, making the maze impossible to complete or time consuming and not very easy. She described the controls as confusing and it wasn’t consistent. However, she said that the start page was clear and to connect the arduino it was easy and she mentioned that the instructions was clear aswell.
After watching my sister play, I realized the problem came from how I mapped the potentiometer values to the maze. The potentiometer sends numbers from 0 to 1023, but the way I converted those numbers into Minnie’s position on the screen was wrong. Because the mapping didn’t match the actual maze area, Minnie kept appearing in the wrong places. So basically the numbers coming from the Arduino did not match the part of the screen where the maze actually is.
From this user testing session, I learned that the mapping has to be extremely accurate when you connect real‑life controls to movement on the screen. Even a tiny mistake in the numbers can completely break how the game feels. I also realized how helpful it is to test with someone else, because they notice problems that I get used to. Even though the game was not working perfectly before and I realized that before the user testing, the testing helped me understand exactly what was wrong since my sister could see the same issue.
User Testing: