Project Overview
Jinmao Wang, Cindy Peng, Lindsey Gu, Tony Liu, Yu Yang
Summary
this is a course project (COGS 123) with the design topic of prototyping a novel mobile app that facilitates social connections. I led a 5 people team to design an innovative social media app that documents and transforms favor-exchange behaviors into excitingly collaborative AR treasure hunting experiences among friends.
My Role
Team lead, competitive analysis, data analysis, user interview, user testing, Design System, prototyping, ui design, website design
Duration
2 months, Winter Quarter 2024
THE PROBLEM
Emotional value in favor exchanges is often overlooked in close-connected social networks
As social beings, we naturally turn to our friends for favors and return the favors back to them. However, as these reciprocities become routine, something crucial starts to fade – because it’s so natural and common to exchange favors among friends, those good feelings we get from reciprocity can be overlooked and short-lived.
problem statement:
How might we transcend daily favor exchanges with friends into opportunities that deepen our social bonds in a more exciting and meaningful way?
OUR SOLUTION
favor treasure hunt - a geospatial social media app that gamifies favor exchanges into fun, collaborative AR treasure hunts within a local community.
Easily post and browse favor requests in a local area
Earn “favor points” by fulfilling others' favor requests
Form hunting teams with friends whom you exchange favor with and use favor points to purchase treasure “clues”
collaboratively use clues to hunt treasures - AR monsters - in real-world locations!
Our app was innovative in two aspects: the creative association between favor exchange and treasure hunt; and the fact that our treasure springs from a famous Chinese literature called "The Classic of Mountains and Seas" which documented a vast array of appearances and stories of Chinese Mythical creatures.
In this lens favor treasure hunt achieves a "two birds one stone" purpose, since it not only fosters a community culture of mutual trust and support but also introduced Chinese culture to users through an interactive and memorable approach.
Design Process
EXPLORE
Brainstorm
At the start of this project, we let our minds run free with all sorts of ideas that promote meaningful social interactions. Topics of ideas ranged from fitness to dreams to roleplay. This phase greatly expanded the pool of options for us to narrow down the best social computing project concept.
We selected the top 2 ideas to sketch out tentative user interface and user flows. After further discussions on which one should be settled as the project concept, we decided to merge these 2 ideas and build on top of that, which produced the geo-spatial based favor-treasure-hunt app vision.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Validate Concept Value
To find out if the 2 key elements of our design concept - favor exchange and treasure hunt game -- are scientifically backed up by existing work on the positive influence on social connections and community identities, we did erature review on this subject.
ANALYZE
Competitor Analysis
After we've validated the social and emotional value of favor exchanges in local community, we set out to do research on potential competitors incorporating similar concepts to affirm the novelty of our app.
Unlike its competitors, Favor Treasure Hunt re-imagines geolocation and social connectivity by emphasizing collaborative contribution and reciprocity. It merges the real-world engagement of Pokemon Go with the community spirit of Zenly, enhancing these through gamified favor exchanges that deepen friendships beyond Payvor’s transactional model. This unique mix positions the app as an inviting platform for community-driven experiences and personal interactions.
EMPATHIZE AND CRITIQUE
User Interview
After having the general sense of how favor treasure hunt is going to work, we found 13 users to learn about their existing favor exchange behavior and get feedbacks on the app concept. I created the first draft of user interview questions and collaborated with other teammates to refine it.
Key findings and implications:
PROTOTYPE
User Flow
PROTOTYPE
Wireframes & Mid-fi Prototype
After having a clear, wholistic logic about how the favor exchange would lead to treasure hunt experience, we sketched out the initial user interface structure. As user flow above indicated, there were 4 key steps for a complete treasure hunt experience: posting and doing favors, team up with friends and get assigned a monster, use favor points to buy clues in clue shop, and gathering with friends in person to hunt the monster.
We then refered back to key findings from user interview to create mid-fi prototype.
TEST
User Testing 1.0
Time to put our concept into practice. Because our system is a bit complicated, we recreated user experience in a mostly physical way to give them a concrete grasp of our design system during our first prototyping session. We made plenty of paper prototypes like favor request forms, a map, a shop interface, and ucsd landmarks to mimic the actual user flow.
I hosted the first round of user prototype and collaborated with my teammates to guide user participation.
As the set of graphs below illustrated, we recreated 6 key steps of favor treasure hunt in a physical setting.
After the live prototyping session, we sent out google surveys to participators for feedbacks on every part of the user flow. We've identified 3 key themes as specified below.
ITERATION AND PROTOTYPE
High-fi Prototype
Key Iterations
We iterated on the user interface based critical feedbacks from the live prototype session above.
Style Guide
High-fi Walkthrough
Favor exchange
Get coins for doing others' favors
Team Up
As time passes by, the system would recognize mutual favor exchange histories shared among certain friends. Consequently, those friends would be automatically added into one treasure-hunting group channel where they get assigned into an AR monster to hunt.
Within the group channel, friends can chat and view the team dashboard that indicates the current hunting progress and what needs to be done to move forward.
As seen on the right, after clicking on Progress, users will see the clues statuses for each team member, indicating the type of clues they need to buy and their current status of unlocking the clues.
Clues
Help players figure out where to find the monsters. They usually work step-by-step that takes players from one place to another until they find the monster’s hiding spot.
Inform players how to make the monsters appear, or be summoned. Players engage in digital activities such as unlocking pattern locks on screen or make certain hand gestures in front of their phone cameras.
Give tips on how to catch the monsters. This could involve running around, pretending to grab something, or using special moves on the phone.
DESIGN IMPACT
User Testing 2.0
To test out if our high-fi prototype enhanced user experience compared to prototype 1.0, we leveled up the proportion of digital elements for the second round of user testing through Figjam (to better replicate the app user flow in comparison to the focus on physical representations in the previous session). All of the user-digital screen interactions were done with the help of our wizard manipulating Figjam interactions in real-time, allowing the users to experience the whole digital prototyping experience.
As a result of prototype 2.0, there were 2 major findings which both substantiated our design iterations and offered further insight on future improvements.
after reviewing the feedback from both user testing sessions, I made the following plans for future steps of improvement.
