Trace

Wayfinding as a medium for mutual communications

The original idea came from one of quick brainstormings on how to tie digital and physical world in the future - using geolocation as a tool to doodle. Our team had a further discussion to identify a compelling scenarios, and we ended up with the concept of using this interaction as a communication tool. At the same time, scenario helped us determine what features we need in the application as a MVP. After the team came up with scenarios, I drew a quick screen transition map for the application that shows all interactions that would happen in those scenarios, and actually started development with Objective-C and a BaaS (Backend as a service, I used Parse).

I particularly cared about ROI of coding vs. usability improvements (e.g., what kinds of UI changes give the most positive impact to usability but do not require too much effort in terms of implementation) since we had about only 10 weeks to finish up the project and the number of developers was very very limited (= just by myself). Once I finished implementations for all features, I asked the team to test out the application in order to figure out possible usability improvement opportunities. We listed all possible UI changes and prioritized them based on both effort on coding and levels of positive impact for usability into account. We did this quick review/improvement iterations a couple of times. Finally, I finished implementation and delivered it to the team so they can conduct deeper user research sessions.

We published a research paper about this project for Computer-Human Interaction conference in 2015, and presented at the conference. We received the Honorable Mention award from CHI.