Project Overview

Yasushi Oh,  Jinmao Wang,  Rency Visperas,  Yolanda Xing

Summary

Aako is a startup technology company with the mission to change how people connect. During my internship, I significantly contributed in innovating a location-based and AR-supported social media app that re-imagines people's connections with the world in an immersive, engaging, and meaningful way. I led the design team to validate user needs, explore design solutions, iterate on user flow, and craft design hand-off to developers.

My Role

UX design lead, product management, competitive analysis, data analysis, user interview, user testing, UI design, visual design, marketing

Duration

8 months, Winter 2024 - Summer 2024

THE PROBLEM

Digital media overload has led Gen Z to be dissociated from information context and disengaged from reality.

Social media apps are essential for maintaining connections and discovering new content, but they often flood us with irrelevant content. The absence of geographical filters means users frequently encounter posts that have no real impact on their lives or communities, such as distant vacation photos or random trends. As a result, we get so wrapped up in the endless scroll that our energy is consumed by all the simulated emotions evoked by the virtual world — At the end of the day, we are exhausted, empty, and detached from reality…

Problem Statement:

How can we strengthen Gen Z’s relation with reality to rekindle their sense of engagement with the feelings, sensory experiences, and social connections situated in the real world?

OUR SOLUTION

Aako - a geospatial social media platform that lets users capture and anchor life experiences in immersive AR bubbles in real-world locations.

Design Process

CONTEXT

What is "Aako" and how does it work?

The First Vision

When I was taking the same design class with the founder of Aako (Yasushi), he reached out to me about his passion project by telling me a “vision”:

" Imagine you are climbing up a famous mountain when traveling around the world. When you reached to the top of the mountain, you get a notification in your phone saying people who have previously been up to the top left some AR-formed audio message. You open this app and turn on the AR camera view to check out those voice memos. As you are listening to what those climbers felt and thought when they were at the exact same place, you not only share a cross-temporal sense of presence with them but also a deeper sense of connection with the very mountain you climb: hearing other people’s story about the mountain enriches your emotional and cognitive perception of physical place... "

I was immediately tantalized by this concept of a location-based and AR-driven application for people to form more authentic connections with the world. Started from there, I became the first UX designer in our start-up company.

Brainstorm Use Cases & Business Potential

Right after I joined the team, we began exploring all the potential user groups, use cases, stake-holders of our app. A lot of the ideas involved sonic elements (audio, music, ect.), as we value sound as a crucial source of real-world grounding experience.

We were specifically interested in Aako’s impact on local businesses, because we thought the hyper-locality nature of Aako could encourage its users to explore new places and make more consumptions. Our company could also gain economic benefits from promoting and cooperating with local businesses in a more engaging way.

We also brainstormed various user identities and scenarios of how Aako can add value to their personal lives. This helps us develop a more concrete understanding on how users would interact and benefit from our app.

Competitive Analysis

After having a basic set of ideas on how Aako is going to work and its business potential, we conducted an extensive competitive analysis on applications that touched on similar concepts/goals as our product. (key words: location-based, AR, audio, social connection, content creation, customer review, local business.)

Key insights:

VALIDATE AND IDENTIFY

User Research 1.0: Survey & Interview

After initial brainstorm and competitive analysis, we clarify the core concept of Aako as: a location-based social media application that leveraged AR technology for content curation (”echoes”), with a focus of audio elements for user experience.

To validate the practicality of our app concept as well as exploring real users needs, I suggested the team make the first round of user research. We sent out user surveys and conducted follow-up user interviews with storyboards. I led the team create survey and interview questions, also assigning the creation of storyboards to different designers.

User Survey

Because our app centered around concepts of location, AR, audio, and social media, we designed a set of multiple/single choice questions asking about users existing experiences in all 3 aspects. We got in-total of 77 responses with majority of users as college students.

Key findings:

User Interview with Storyboard

we then created 8 pairs of storyboards and did follow-up user interview with 15 out of 77 of the users who filled the user survey.

ORGANIZE

MVP User Flow

Translating all the key findings into actionable design solutions, I assisted the team to construct a basic Aako user flow that included all the MVP features supported by user research and previous study on competitor apps.

Overall we divided the user flow into 4 main sections (highlighted in red gradients):

Below was our mind-map for Aako user flow, all the yellow sticky notes referred to must-have features for MVP.

DESIGN

Mid-fi Prototype

The Design of Echo

since the main point of Aako centered around the AR stories (Echoes) we enable users to create, we put a lot of effort thinking about the exact format of these echoes. Previously in storyboard and brainstorming sessions, we conceived echoes as in all sorts of shapes from sound-waves to flying pizzas to floating badges, which were all eventually deemed either not innovative enough or too complicated.

As a result, we re-designed the representation format of echoes based on 2 related user interview insights:

A/B Prototype

after echo representation is decided, I want designers to explore alternative ways for designing the flow of particular user actions so that we could have higher chance identifying the design version that would produce the best user experience.

I divided designers into different teams with each team focusing on the ui design of a major user flow section (as specified in the MVP user flow chart). For each section designers needed to make 2 versions of design for A/B testing later.

TEST

User Research 2.0: A/B Testing

To find out which design version feels more intuitive to users and test out the newly added design elements, I initiated our second round of user research — A/B testing. We ended up doing 30min-1hour long testing sessions with 12 users.

ITERATE AND DESIGN

High-fi prototype 1.0

We iterated and refined user interfaces based on user feedbacks from A/B testing.

TEST

User Research 3.0: Usability Testing

After our first version of high-fi prototype is done, I led the team to make a clickable prototype of key user experience parts (echo browse (including fly feature), echo creation, and echo interaction) so as to prepare for usability testing. This round of user research was crucial for the development of Aako as we finally could simulate the experience of using the real app with all the polished user interface frames.

To craft an usability testing session that would mimic the real user experience of Aako as close as possible, we devised an immersive role play prototyping process using google street view (shown as the screenshot below). We told users to imagine they were wandering around a particular area in New York city and that they were using Aako to explore the place.

ITERATE & FINALIZE

High-fi prototype 2.0

Sort out Priority Features for MVP

Because implementation of the ui takes significant amount of time, money, and energy, we decided to re-evaluate all existing app features and cut back the ones that were not necessary for MVP experience for a more efficient product launch. I suggested to remove the following pages / features as they are not essential for MVP user experience. After discussion, my team agreed to my decision.

Key Iterations from Hi-fi 1.0

Final Screens

I had only shown the key frames from each section but the entire design was much more elaborate. Please refer to our figma file to review the whole experience :)

CONCLUSION

Design Impact

Our wonderful engineering team has been developing the software since we finished UI and UX design. For now we had completed functionalities for all sections except notifications and few pages under Echo profile. We expected the BETA version of Aako to launch in December 2024.

Reflection