Introduction

The aim of this week’s project was to work as a pair to design a new experience for a user to playfully navigate a place. In our design we had to consider what we would enjoy using to navigate as well as how it could benefit the user.

Our work had to be consolidated and presented to the rest of the class at the end of the project as an A3 concept board to demonstrate our idea and how it would work if it existed.

Initial Ideas

As a pair, we started off by thinking about how people already navigate around Dundee and realised that people use services like Google Maps to quickly and efficiently get to their destination. We felt this lacked any sense of exploration or enjoyment as you would constantly be staring at a phone screen with no intention of deviating from the route set by the app.

We both had ideas revolving around either a navigated map that takes you on a longer, more interesting journey to reach your destination or some sort of narrated set of audio directions. They both aimed to create a more interesting walking experience for people who have been residents of Dundee for some time and wish to change the way they get from point A to point B.

We decided to combine elements of the two and created the idea of an app that selects a route that takes you around points of interest on your journey and gives you directions through headphones alongside information or stories about the local area. We also had an idea that you could collect stories or factual information about Dundee from various physical scan points around the city, located in notable places, where a QR code could be used to access the files.

We felt this had the potential to be a great user experience as it allowed the person to put their phone away and take in more of their surroundings while listening to information about the places they walk through.

On the other hand, the number of stories and pieces of information could be very limited and someone using the same route multiple times could end up hearing the exact same things over and over again.

From there we took the elements we liked and brought them forward to our final idea, refining them into a better experience.

Idea Refinement

For our final idea, we decided to flip the user base on its head and create an experience for the visitors of Dundee. This was triggered when researching the city and discovering a lot of interesting history that would interest tourists and give them a greater understanding of how the city was formed.

Our new idea was an app that partnered alongside physical waypoints called ‘Beacons’ which allow the user to travel between them, collecting fact files on the location they are in.

Process

We set about finalising a design for the Beacons. For this, we took numerous pieces of foam and set about rapidly creating sculptures or pillars that could potentially inspire the final appearance.

From here we made some sketches and decided which elements we liked the best from our quickfire prototype session. In the end, we decided on a square based totem, featuring archways to walk through and stone inset detailing, inspired by castles and old buildings.

We then made a final foam model of the Beacon to scale, before creating CAD models and renders of it. This allowed us to see how it could look if it was made from different materials such as stone, plastic and wood.

We then set about designing the accompanying app and put together a quick set of sketches and layouts. We wanted to include a main menu, map, compass (for navigating to the beacons), timeline and a fact file page.

We liked the idea of having all the buttons be circular as they would then match the shape of the compass. We chose our accent colour as a bright blue to contrast against the white and grey of the text and backgrounds making the app seem less serious and more playful.

Outcome

Our final experience, when all brought together is a fun way to get tourists exploring the city, collecting fact files at many of the historically important areas and landmarks of Dundee, to enjoy the popular attractions and to discover hidden and less known areas of the city.

We also intended the project to be temporary exhibit, lasting a few months, so that it could then move from city to city, creating a buzz of activity in each place it visits.

To navigate the experience the user simply loads the map and selects a Beacon, which will light up on the screen and a blue path will appear. Once within a 200m radius of the chosen Beacon, the map fades out and a compass appears, making the user manually navigate to the Beacon, where they will receive a fact file containing text and audio information about the area. This then gets stored in a timeline of the city which can be accessed by the menu screen or the map.

In our presentation we took a render of a Beacon, the app layouts and the model of the beacon to convey the purpose of the experience and how it could benefit a tourist who has limited time in Dundee.

If we could revisit the project we would potentially redesign our Beacons, in order to make them more eye-catching which could attract more passersby and encourage them to interact with them.

I have learned many useful skills from this project, such as CAD and foam modelling as well as idea refinement and team collaboration. I have enjoyed working with an unfamiliar theme and exploring the different ways people navigate the places they see every day or the unfamiliar streets of a new city.