The Experience Experiment

Design of Experiments - Prototying - Interviewing

Early 2020, I designed a theme park type ride experience that was designed to test if having choice during a ride would make the ride more enjoyable.

The Challenge

Design and conduct an experiment that relates to the way something is designed. Our team chose to ask if choice during a ride increases enjoyment.

The Journey

We conducted literature reviews of similar experiments, determined what kind of ride we wanted to test and how to test it, prototyped with a found ride vehicle in class, and built a simple ride vehicle that could hold two people and be pushed by one of us.

The Outcome

We ran our experiment on half a basketball court on campus and we had 20 participants over the course of 10 rides. We failed to reject our null-hypothesis. In other words, we saw a slight correlation that random was more enjoyable, but the data wasn't statistically significant.