Scavenger Hunt: A proposed VR/AR app for city tourism
Author’s Note: After graduating with my PhD in experimental psychology and beginning my job search in UX, I looked to my LinkedIn networks to try to build my portfolio with more collaborative, design-based work. This project idea was sparked by designer Oliver Nguyen. After connecting and reading more about his ideas for VR/AR, I saw an opportunity to offer my skill set to help test a customer experience. Read on to learn how it went!
When inspiration strikes, it feels less like a lightning bolt and more like an itch that I can't quite scratch. One random LinkedIn post view and 16 straight hours later, I feel like I've finally scratched that itch!
In 2017, Oliver Nguyen shared this post about an idea for a VR game called Scavenger Hunt. He shared that despite his job search-induced stress, he still felt as creative as ever. He was inspired by iPhone X, iWatch Series 3, and the city of San Francisco, and he was looking for feedback from fellow designers and developers. Needless to say, his creativity was highly infectious (a word that I know, when coupled with all my talk about not sleeping and being itchy, makes me sound ill), and I immediately thought of an application for Scavenger Hunt within the world of tourism.
The Concept
Several developments in VR/AR technology have a huge impact on the tourism industry. Wanna check out the room you booked? Take a virtual tour of your hotel! Wanna plan dinner while you're on vacation? Scan a restaurant for their menu! Not used to the language? With Google Translate, you can take a picture of a street sign and translate it instantly!
This is a step for potentially exponential growth for the Bay Area. San Francisco International Airport took a strong hit in early 2017 due to tensions that arose regarding the travel ban. This is diseheartening especially because San Francisco Travel reported 2016 as being a record-breaking year for tourism. In March of this year, San Francisco Travel President and CEO Joe D'Alessandro spoke to KCBS about tourism concerns. Mr. D'Alessandro gave a hearty plea to "roll out the red carpet" to tourists, and I think a smart move would be to highlight Silicon Valley.
Scavenger Hunt lives up to its name -- visitors who join the search go on a journey fueled by curiosity and clues, making tours an active experience. Let's use San Francisco as a case study. Not only would visitors get to test new AR tech in the Silicon Valley, but they would also get to learn about San Francisco through gamification. This is the process of using video game structure, tools, and principles to supplement learning.
Gamification is regularly studied in different types of classroom environments, with a strong focus on how to support academic progress. (Click here to watch game designer Jane McGonigal discuss games in education.) Even Pokémon Go has been used to structure learning, and it makes sense why gamification is often beneficial for students. Though it does not provide the intrinsic motivation necessary to drive one to act, gamification builds on behavioral principles (Pavlov, Skinner -- y'know, the greats) to teach and reward actions.
Scavenger Hunt would take this one step further by incorporating it into an adventure. Visitors would the chance to go on a journey through the city of their choice, learning facts as they explore landmarks and popular attractions. Even longtime residents could take advantage of this journey to find interesting, new hangout spots to shake up their routines. It also doesn't hurt that the possibilities for marketing are endless (ask users to pick up and scan a new product, or draw their attention to sales!).
By prioritizing consumer engagement, Scavenger Hunt could provide a unique user experience that showcases all the best that San Francisco has to offer, while also giving explorers a sense of accomplishment. As you explore more places, you could work your way up to a City Expert level, learn secret facts or gain added functionalities, or even add credits for an additional trip excursion during your vacation. With Scavenger Hunt, you get a key to the city!
One of the best facets of this application is the partnerships that visitors, tour companies, and tourism advisory boards could make with peers in the tech world. Tour companies would be able to advertise San Francisco in a new way, learn about customers by gauging user interest and receiving user feedback with every experience, and collect new data (e.g., iPhone X face mapping and muscle movement = facial expressions!) to ensure the best, most personalized tour experience for every user.
Tech companies who invest in Scavenger Hunt could in turn get new outlets for VR/AR UX testing in the field. Tourism boards would then be able to boast innovative, high quality experiences for visitors, which could help increase the amount of visitors -- something of particular note in the wake of the kinds of slumps that worry Mr. D'Alessandro. All involved parties would get to help revolutionize VR/AR in tourism, increase their customer reach, and expand on valuable partnerships, all while spurring on the sense of exploration!
The Research
I put together a concept map that outlines how a UX Researcher like me would approach baselining and assessing Scavenger Hunt’s performance!
One key early step in discovery would be to identify primary user personas. Given our main goals of Engage, Showcase, and Learn, some primary users could include general visitors to San Francisco. Another group could be comprised of professional tour guide companies that might be interested in implementing Scavenger Hunt into their tours. Another group could be industry leaders who are interested in seeing applications for AR/VR in real-world experiences. It would then be important to dig deeper into the motivations that each of these primary user persona groups would have to use Scavenger Hunt.
It would then be important to identify key objectives and metrics of Scavenger Hunt’s success, as well as supportive data about user attitudes about Scavenger Hunt. For instance, we could start alpha testing in the lab on ensuring that we got the concepts and basic functionality right. We could also beta test in the real world to assess product fidelity. Throughout all testing, we can experiment with technology that can help us identify how enjoyable or fun these experiences are for these users. (For an example of how that might be measured, check out my Brain-EE project in Academic Research!)
In conjunction with previously collected data, we could survey users to validate how enjoyable they thought Scavenger Hunt was. It would be important to compare this with baseline and control groups (e.g., tourists or tour groups who did not use Scavenger Hunt vs. those who did). Finally, when sharing results, it would be important to show a multi-dimensional summary of all information collected to get a holistic perspective on Scavenger Hunt’s success.
Summary
Of course, these ideas would not have come to light had it not been for Oliver Nguyen's own sense of exploration. I appreciate that Oliver was willing to let me brainstorm about his idea in order to get practice on how to design a research project for such a forward-thinking product concept. Aside from the crazy amounts of possibilities sparked by this one idea, I've learned that being part of the LinkedIn community is about more than networking and professional development. It's about moving past slumps of all sorts, finding new ways to stretch yourself, and finding people along the way who are up for the ride.