Design Development Phase Report
Taking a first pass at designing our app
Initial Branstorm
We did an idea brainstorm last phase before getting user input, and then used input from the interviews to refine and narrow down on our final idea.
- A Pokemon GO-like experience where people take pictures of plants and animals they see, and sort of compete with their friends to see who can capture the most varieties of wildlife.
- Game that gives users a quest to find a specific plant or animal species each day (could also include long term challenges for species in other locations)
- App where you scan a certain plant or animal and it tells you where else in the world it resides, where it came from, etc
- Quiz game where users compete against people nearby about local wildlife (could have local, national, or global settings)
- Alerts you when you make a wrong turn while on a hike or bike ride
4 Ideas and Mockups
We took 4 ideas from our brainstorm and made quick mockups in Figma for these ideas so we would be able to get direct user feedback on these ideas during the interviews.
Virtual Birdhouse App allows you to take care of birds in your virtual birdhouse
Photo Scavenger Hunt App prompts you to go outside and take pictures of interesting nature in your area while it is in season.
App that gives you a themed playlist for your activity motivates people to go outside and exercise more, and give them more enjoyment of their activity.
App designed like Pokemon Go, allows players to work collaboratively and competitively to find and register different wildlife species
One Idea
During our interviews, we got direct feedback about our 4 app ideas. Users seemed most excited about the Pokemon Go idea, so we decided to go with that. We started on making some mockups for the app idea.
We mocked up three main features we thought the app could feature:
Competitive Racing
We knew that people needed some sort of motivation to get them to use the app, and competition is an excellent motivator for many people. So we wanted to include some competitive aspect in our game.
Relaxed “Bait” Mode
We also heard from users that they got a lot of relaxation from going outside, so we decided to add a more low-key aspect to our game.
Social Features
We also heard from users that they liked to go outside and meet up with friends, so we decided to add a way to connect with friends to the app.
Further Development
After deciding on this idea, we did some more analysis of our user interviews, and compared our current idea against information from the interviews and our affinity diagram.
Pivot
After looking further into our user needs, we realized that our current app idea was not ideal because most of the people we interviewed did not like having their phones out while on a walk. We decided to pivot to a version of the app which would only require users to look at their phone occasionally.
How our interviews informed our decision:
- People are generally excited about AR
- A few of our interviewees expressed desires to connect with nature by being in nature itself
- People expressed that they were not excited about constantly looking at their phones while on their walk. So we decided to tweak the idea so it could be in the person’s back pocket over the duration of most of their walk
Turning Needs into General Solutions
- Need: People want to go outside but have difficulty finding the activation energy and motivation
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Solution: Have app provide motivation and prompting to go outside
- Need: People enjoy connecting with their friends while going outside
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Solution: Make sure the app has a collaborative feature to allow people to interact with their friends both virtually and in-person
- Need: When people go outside, they often want minimal time spent looking at their phones, and only use them for short periods, such as using a phone to take a picture or check directions
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Solution: This app will allow people to walk around without constantly looking at their phones, while still providing motivation to go outside through the aspect of gaming and the possibility of finding treasure
Turning General Solutions into Specific Features
Next up, we wanted to get more specific about our general idea of an app. Working with information we synthesized from our interviews, we came up with several features of our new idea for an app.
- App notifies people at certain points throughout the day to go outside
- Notifications are related to motivating factors, such as being able to make progress in the game
- Game can be played with friends, both collaboratively and competitively
- Mining/digging up treasure feature
- App stays quietly active throughout a walk, except to buzz when a user is near treasure that they can dig up
- Process of digging up treasure is quick but rewarding, and users can get back to their walk
We decided to pivot from a catching animals to a mining game mechanic, because we felt that the mechanic of mining better supported the feature of leaving the phone in a pocket for most of a walk.
Focus in and work on some specific features
We created a few preliminary sketches to get our ideas across.
Full App Wireframe
Storyboard
This storyboard describes how a potential user might interact with our mining app
Effort Map
| Team Member | Tasks |
|---|---|
| Katie |
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| Theo |
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| Erika |
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| Maalvika |
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