For millenial travelers who prioritize unique and exciting experiences, AdvntR is a concept app that creates immersive adventures at cultural & historic sites through Augmented Reality and geofencing technology.
Unlike traditional audio and guided tours, AdvntR empowers users to explore and discover on their own terms by embracing non-linear paths and using entertainment as a means of education.
Challenge:
Create, design, test & pitch a new product to potential investors. This project was completed as a part of General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive program.
Opportunity:
Create an app concept that enhances travelers’ experiences by providing a unique view into the past via Augmented Reality, along with information in real-time about the sights they are seeing.
Outcome:
The final concept was green-lit by both investors, who found the value proposition and solution not only original and impressive, but ripe with opportunities for accessibility and further growth.
Timeline: 2 weeks
Team: 4 UX Designers spanning the fields of UX Research, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, UX Writing, UI & Visual Design
My roles: Team Lead, UX Writer, Interaction Designer, Information Architect, Researcher
Target Platform: Apple iOS
Research Goals:
discover pain points and opportunities for travelers who specifically seek out cultural & historic sights
define the target user for an Augmented Reality travel app
assess the competition for AR within the travel market space
Methods:
competitive/comparative analysis
screener survey
user interviews
In order to hone our focus and decide what problem we wanted to solve within the travel sector, we conducted a competitive analysis of popular travel and tour companies.
We discovered only one other company using Augmented Reality within the travel space: ARtGlass, which deploys proprietary AR glasses within a select number of museums and historic sights to enhance visitor experiences and is therefore limited by the reach of their technology.
38 respondents
Our goal was to find casual (ie not business) travelers who specifically enjoy cultural and historic sights and who would be open to the possibility of exploring new technology to elevate their experiences.
11 interviews, ages 26-38
Our interview questions covered a range of themes that might help us uncover important insights about our users on the following topics:
Positive & Negative Travel Experiences: What factors improved travelers’ experiences? What factors detracted from a traveler’s ability to enjoy their experience?
Technology use before, during & after travel: What apps do travelers use to learn about the places they’re visiting, and what specific advantages do those apps have? What are the ways in which these apps fall short?
Guided tours while traveling: What do travelers like and dislike about guided tours and why?
Augmented Reality: What percentage of users in our target demographic have used Augmented Reality? What did they like or dislike about the experience? For those who have not, why haven’t they used it and would they consider trying it in the future?
Problem: Though 60% of our screener respondents had used Augmented Reality in the past, we found from our interviews that those who have used it either considered it a novelty that wore off after a while OR had used it specifically and solely for the purpose of Pokemon Go. Those who had not used it felt little motivation to try.
It was clear then that we could not focus our app solely on Augmented Reality and expect to have a large user base. Rather, we needed to look for a more concrete problem for which we could use Augmented Reality as a tool in our solution. After taking another hard look at our data, we decided to hone in on guided tours & learning about historic and cultural sights, with the following key research trends to guide us:
many travelers don’t like to plan out every step of their travels, preferring to leave room for spontaneity.
travelers like to visit sights recommended to them by locals
when traveling internationally, users are concerned about data usage and expenses
travelers prefer to avoid large groups of tourists whenever possible
travelers enjoy learning about specific sights, whether reading up online or participating in tours
Based on these trends and our revised problem space, we created persona to better frame our target user and their behaviors, needs and desires.
Riley loves to visit and learn about cultural and historic sights when she travels, but she often feels overwhelmed by the price of guided tours and underwhelmed by the tours themselves… and she hates being stuck in big groups of tourists.
How might we provide a cost-effective way for Riley to learn about cultural and historic sights in an engaging and entertaining manner while providing her the agency to create her own path?
With our target user and problem space identified, we began to visualize solutions. From hand-drawn sketches to the whiteboard and from whiteboard to mid-fidelity wireframes, we built our first prototype and began testing.
The first iteration of our concept included 4 major components:
Featured Tours: The app comes loaded with a selection of tours curated and created by AdvntR. Users can scroll through a list of themes and topics and select the tour that matches their interests.
Custom Tours: To allow for an even greater sense of agency and freedom, users may also create custom tours from a list of sights in the selected city, much like creating a playlist in Spotify.
Sights: Users can use this section to look at detailed information about various sights even without being on a specific tour. Users can add sights to their custom tours from this section if desired.
Augmented Reality View: A number of points of interest in each tour or site can be view through Augmented Reality through the “travel through time” CTA
Key Learnings
100% of users were unclear on what the primary purpose of the app was: trip planning, or use on sight?
75% of users wanted access to featured tours via the sight detail page (e.g. if reading about the colosseum, is there a way to easily find a featured tour through the colosseum page?)
100% of users found the featured tour page confusing; how would they be able to know which tours included the colosseum?
100% of users didn’t notice the “travel through time” CTA
Our first round of usability testing left us with significant questions. Questions we couldn’t answer, such as:
How do we make it clear that our app is meant to be used to learn about points of interest while at that location?
If the sights section’s primary purpose is for research, what advantage do we have over google/web searches? And if the purpose of the app is to be used on sight, why do we have a research-focused section at all?
How would our app generate enough revenue to justify the cost of the Augmented Reality? How would we make money?
What makes our app preferable to audio tours, which are already low cost and don’t require data?
With these questions in mind, we went back to the drawing board… literally.
We decided it was necessary to change our project significantly in order to make it valuable to users and worthwhile to potential investors. Not only did this involve redefining the scope of the project, but it also required us to consider how we might differentiate ourselves from existing competitors within the market for educational tours.
In order to establish the branding and tone of the AdvntR application, I conducted secondary research regarding visitor serving organizations (VSO’s) such as museums and zoos to find out what factors are most likely to influence a visitor’s enjoyment of their experience. As reflected in the chart below, entertainment experience is rated as the top factor in visitor satisfaction across a range of VSO’s. Check out the full study to find out how they arrived at the respective weights and values for each KPI.
Additionally, I conducted an informational interview with a senior creative consultant at Museum Hack, a millennial-targeted company solving a similar problem space as AdvntR but specifically within museums. We discussed factors such as individualized paths, creating experiences that feel exclusive/VIP, and the reverently irreverent tone used by Museum Hack to engage their audience.
Due to our restrictive timeline, further research for our new solution was limited to secondary research. Given a longer timeline, we would have considered the following additional research strategies:
user interviews focused more specifically on guided & audio tours, as well as on gamification preferences & behaviors
contextual inquiry: regular tours vs Museum Hack tours
tech limitations regarding Augmented Reality, geofencing and their requirements for data & battery life
In accordance with our secondary research, we decided to significantly change our approach to the concept of educational tours. Major changes for the second iteration included:
rebranding of “tours” to “adventures” in order to enliven the tone of the app
elimination of the sights section and tab bar to refocus the app on curated adventures
repackage information in a unique & exciting way to encourage education via entertainment
introduction of a non-linear adventure format to give users greater agency
paring down of points of interest marked on map and introduction of “easter eggs”- additional facts and information discoverable only by crossing the geofenced boundary
repositioning the “travel through time'“ CTA to make the Augmented Reality feature more discoverable for users
Key learnings:
User response to updated copy was overwhelmingly positive
75% of users were still failed to notice the “travel through time” CTA
50% of users were frustrated that they had to search their location, rather than the app auto-populating adventures in their current location
100% of users didn’t understand what the question mark icon was, and 50% chose not to investigate it further.
Key Changes:
we moved the “travel through time” CTA to the center of the information overlays and visually represented it with a button, rather than a link
we changed the landing page to the adventures main page in the user’s current location, with the option to switch locations at the top of the page if needed
we changed the ? icons into two separate icons: scrolls to represent fun facts and treasure chests to represent artifacts
Our final hurdle in completing our concept was to figure out how to introduce users to the unique form of interaction required for use of the app. We solved this challenge by adding a progressive onboarding experience that occurs upon the user’s first time opening the app. Onboarding gave us the additional advantage of immediately familiarizing the user with the brand’s voice and style.
Our “potential investors” were particularly exciting about the possibilities for AdvntR as an app accessible for all. In order live up to that possibility, AdvntR would need to develop an audio component that behaves similarly to the visual component as far as interaction is concerned.
Beyond that, creating an Android version of AdvntR with translations in a wide variety of languages would allow the app to be marketed to a much broader audience around the globe.
Finally, since many of our users tend to travel with companions, we would love to do further research on the possibility of multi-person adventures, potentially including gamification for maximum user engagement within the platform.
