The primary aim of this thesis is to provide design and user experience recommendations for a digital social skills and pragmatics game for deaf and hard of hearing students. Research frameworks employed are goal-directed design and qualitative analysis by way of focus groups, semi-structured interviews with parents and teachers students and methods used within grounded theory. A key intention of the game intervention is to improve social skills by providing students with an effective and engaging learning tool. The overall purpose of the game is thus to increase the exposure deaf and hard of hearing students have to effective social communication strategies, and to promote positive self-identity.

The author’s research contribution was to support the design endeavour with qualitative user research that identified key user experience themes, unearthed common social skills and communication patterns to target, and developed analysis and insight for the future development cycle. The design artefacts produced include personas, scenarios and scene recommendations to inform the future design of an effective social skills intervention for d/Deaf and hard of hearing students.