Scavenger
Tasks: Concept Development, Research, Wireframe, Prototype, Usability Testing, Visual Design
Role: UX/UI
Duration: 5 Months
How it started…
I have an affinity for adventure and creative problem solving. It started off with Japanese metal brain teasers, then escape rooms. I always thought it would be cool to do the story telling and to reverse-engineer the escape room experience. What if I could make a game? When given the brief from Career Foundry, the bootcamp I attended, I thought creating a scavenger hunt app would be the perfect challenge to marry my design skills and love for solving puzzles.
The Challenge
How might we create a high energy scavenger hunt app that promotes team building, problem solving, community and fun?
This is one of the first projects I’ve seen from ideation to completion. I used a mix between the Double Diamond design process and Lean Design in order to deliver a clickable prototype in 5 months.
I started my research by conducting a competitive analysis of two popular apps in the App Store - Goosechase and Let’s Roam. The full analysis includes the competitors’ profiles, marketing strategies, SWOT profile, app reviews, as well as design and performance tests. You can check out the full analysis here.
Scavenger’s provisional core features for MVP based on key findings:
“Create Game” feature on mobile.
Point based games with incentives to beat-the-clock.
Diverse tasks including photo/video, text, GPS check-in, audio, and puzzles.
Redeemable rewards upon completion of a game.
Both competitors had games that were non-linear and task based. I decided that Scavenger would stand out from the competition if it were story based and followed a linear progression.
I then gathered data by conducting surveys and interviews with my potential target audience. I received 82 responses to my survey, and conducted 3 remote interviews.
Learning Objectives:
Gain insight on users’ experiences with scavenger hunts
Understand what tools people use to create scavenger hunts
Determine what kind of features would be useful/enjoyable
Insights:
Users need an incentive to play and complete the game
Users have different types of personalities and therefore will need diverse sets of tasks to accommodate interests
Users want to learn something new and a good challenge
Users need to feel team camaraderie in order to be fulfilled
Solutions: Based on these insights, I knew that I needed to make the app exciting and high energy. I did this through the tone of voice of the copy, choosing vibrant color schemes, creating rewards for points, and diversifying tasks.
I created these personas in order to stay anchored on the users and avoid letting my desire for features trump user needs.
Once I established the different personas, I created journey maps in order to get into their shoes and understand their potential experiences using Scavenger. The features I implemented from the journey maps were the point modals for playing games and easy to fill in task templates for creating games.
In order to create an organic site flow, I did card sorting with 11 different users to establish the architecture.
I chose three different user flows to be included in Scavenger’s MVP, and mocked them up into low and mid fidelity wireframes.
Once I created a prototype using my mid fidelity screens, I got tons of feedback from potential users. Two of the biggest changes made were the navigation bar and changing the “Create Game” screens from cards to full screens. I also added in a progress bar to show total points, total time passed, and total of tasks completed.
End Results: It was a challenge to see things from start to finish, and getting pulled in different directions when it came to feedback. I constantly had to remind myself “But is that essential to the MVP and does the user really need that?”. In the end, I gained a tremendous amount of experience through this project including working in Figma and using various UX research methodologies.
Moving forward with the project, I would like to add more features, such as the leaderboard and user profiles. I would also like to do some user testing on the high fidelity prototype and add puzzles as a type of task.