Where’s Waldo AR
AWARD PROJECT • AR • PRODUCT DESIGN
Design a mobile AR game application for Where’s Waldo puzzle books
PROJECT TYPE
AR game app design project
AWARD RECEIVED
ANDY Awards • Gold • 2020
New York Festival • Gold • 2020
The Art Director’s Club • Silver • 2019
TEAM
My role: Product design
Collaborating graphic designers: Rosalyn Oh, Kevin Bae, Sean Dong
DURATION
Completed in Jan 2019
Redesigned in Oct 2021
MY CONTRIBUTION
User Research: Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, Affinity Maps, Persona Mapping, Journey Mapping, Empathy Maps
UX Design: Sketches, Wireframing, Usability Testing, High-fidelity prototyping
BACKGROUND
Overview
The original Where’s Waldo(Wally) is a series of children’s puzzle books consisting of a series of double-page spread illustrations and challenging readers to find a character named Waldo(Wally) hidden in the group of illustrations.
In 2019, my team and I presented the idea of making Where's Waldo a mobile AR game app to the award shows and won many awards. In 2022, being a product designer, I solely revisited the idea and redesigned the product that catered to the user and ones which also helped the process of the game system more intuitive.
My role
As the sole product designer, I worked independently in strategizing, conceptualizing, designing, user testing, and iterating with stakeholder feedback to create a final prototyped solution. My primary responsibilities included defining the product strategy, analyzing user research, wireframing low-fidelity designs to prototyping high-fidelity designs, and collaborating closely with the product manager.
DEFINE
Problem statement
Classic games made a comeback as online games and mobile apps. But they were simply given digital facelifts, maintaining the same gaming mechanics that fall short of competing against actual modern games. Since Where’s Waldo puzzle books are limited by pre-illustrated pages of the past, they are behind the times and passing into oblivion as generations go by.
Create a unique game experience for people who don’t have nostalgia for classic games?
HOW MIGHT WE…
IMPLEMENT
Solution
Our solution was launching Where’s Waldo AR app that completely redefines the way we play the game by merging the latest augmented reality technology with the classic Where’s Waldo puzzle book. By using AR technology, the app would turn any photos in the user’s photo library into a game scene that the user can play. It would engage the next generation in intimate relationships and provide infinite resources to refresh players in every play.
Competitive analysis
Classic games like Monopoly, Uno, and Scrabble made a comeback as online games and mobile apps. But they were simply given digital facelifts, maintaining the same gaming mechanics that fall short of competing against actual modern games.
Task Flow
We synthesized the collected data from the interviews and competitive analysis into an affinity map to help form insights and brainstorm design ideas to solve user’s higher-order problems.
Key insights
Based on the affinity map, we found that people with low vision are capable of using many digital devices and assistive technologies. They are even more skillful to adapt to these technologies.
However, they set up different sounds and/or vibrations to different applications, to identify which application the notification comes from. They are required to pay attention to all different sounds and/or vibrations — and this is overwhelming for them and the people around them, especially when different types of notifications all come at the same time.
It takes a lot of energy in daily life by paying attention to alerts from all those devices or technologies. Technologies are helping disabled people a lot but also interrupting in different ways with alerts. They continue to process sounds and/or vibrations even more than people without disabilities.
Among the collected data, we generated the following key insights that I want to highly emphasize on.
User persona & Empathy map
Based on my insight and observation from the research methods, I created a user persona that captured the essence of our users and their characteristics. I also formed empathy maps to understand their needs and frustrations.
Task analysis & Journey map
The persona and empathy map helped us outline a hierarchical task analysis, which we then used to make a journey map highlighting the pain points and the opportunities for improvement.
Brainstorm ideas
IDEATE
Redefine User flow
FPO. We tackled the original design prototypes by starting from reviewing its information architecture and pin-pointing the risks and errors in the user flows. Because finances are drivers' top priorities, the updated flow prevents the app from selecting the rental before it is available to avoid incorrect charges. We mainly focused on the following part:
Conceptualization & Sketching
Low-fidelity prototype
DESIGN & PROTOTYPE
Our main goal was no audio feedback, easy-to-use but highly secure, and tactile methods for alerting cyberattacks. FPO. With the improved user flows and research insights, I created low-fidelity prototypes to improve the overall experience based on the previous refined user flows and research insights. The Low fidelity prototypes helped us take the sketches to a next level but a step before the high-fidelity mockups. Simple prototypes were of great use in identifying components for framing the design system and also to get initial feedback from the team before we stepped into concentrating on the visual design which required a mammoth effort.
User testing
EVALUATE
FPO We conducted expert evaluation and peer review sessions to evaluate our three designs. A set of standard questions were asked to evaluate interest in the designs. We ended up choosing the design with the highest scores – Service Center.
we conducted user testing to understand how users would interact with our prototype and their adjacent experience in student information platforms. The team was also able to understand whether the ideas presented were engaging and identify what needed to be improved.
Tasks:
1.
2.
3.
Evaluation method
Expert evaluation
10 Experts
Senior technicians
Stakeholders
Peer review
10 HCI Master’s students
Findings
1.
2.
3.
Refine & Iterate design
DESIGN & PROTOTYPE
FPO. Feedback. before and after
Evaluate usability & accessibility
EVALUATE
data. numbers
Takeaways
REFLECTION
FPO
Next steps
FPO