“Xbox is embracing inclusive design as part of our Gaming for Everyone effort,” said Phil Spencer, head of Xbox. “In this ongoing initiative, every single person on Team Xbox is working together to try to make gaming accessible, equitable and sustainable for all.”

Take, for example, the challenge of the broken Xbox headset.

An Xbox employee realized that his broken headset prevented him from joining in his beloved Xbox social gaming features. He got to thinking about people with hearing loss and people who are non-verbal, and he became aware of the challenges they face in these collaborative aspects of gaming. In some cases, people are unable to participate at all. There was a need to be filled.

Katy Jo Wright, a senior program manager at Xbox who is passionate about making Xbox a place everyone can enjoy, heard about the challenge and worked with Team Xbox to set up a five-day Social Gaming Sprint as part of the Gaming for Everyone effort.

Xbox brought in Kris Woolery, a senior design strategist who leads inclusive design projects across Microsoft, to run the sprint. Woolery describes the goal of the sprint as “building empathy so people look beyond their own experiences and create solutions that are more adaptable to individual people.” In each sprint, she aims to construct an environment for people to learn in a way that is practical to their lives, all with the goal of raising consciousness.

The Xbox Social Gaming Sprint started by bringing together designers, researchers, writers and program managers from different areas of Xbox in a room packed with sticky notes, colored pens, white boards and boxed lunches.

“We asked ourselves some big questions,” said Wright. “What is a gamer? Who is a gamer? A big part of Gaming for Everyone is enabling all types of gamers to play as they want, in the way they want. We need to challenge all of our perceptions.”

The first day, attendees interacted with and interviewed subject matter experts including ASL interpreters, people who love gaming and have varying degrees of hearing loss or verbal abilities, a doctor who studies the inner ear and the father of an adolescent gamer who has autism and is non-verbal.

Bryce Johnson, an interaction designer at Xbox, and J.R. Reyes, a visual designer for the Xbox console, both attended the sprint. Reyes said, “The meta of it was there are more challenges than just hearing and speaking – it’s really about communication at every level.”

On day two, Woolery had the group take their insights from their subject matter expert interviews and reflect on the context of and the capabilities needed for multiplayer games. They considered questions like “Who is excluded? Think about the different components of multiplayer games as ‘micro interactions’ of an experience to evaluate.”

Their main notes from the subject matter experts were written on sticky notes. All notes went on the whiteboards and the group made meaning from them: searching out patterns, themes, motivations, mismatches, similarities and differences. The mismatches were clustered and evaluated for opportunities. Participants then generated ideas from these opportunities, which they turned into storyboards of potential interactions that could improve the experience for a spectrum of gamers.

“Once we started investigating the ideas,” Johnson said, “we went wider in our research, and soon we were trying to go as wide as we could go.”

On the following days, the group used their research and storyboarding to create prototypes of solutions and present them to the sprint participants.