Bouncing Ideas Around – Workshop Challenge: Part 1
Onto this week’s challenge, I have more or less an idea of an outcome. The idea is an app that works primarily via an image recognition search engine – of course the user can type in a search or just hit ‘generate’ and result will come up based on the time of day, date and even the weather.
The challenge that I am facing here is that how am I going to make the content more engaging or even ‘immersive’ (i tend to use this word a lot, probably it’s because I crave it). I did write down a user journey – I took a rather lengthy approach as I wrote it in paragraph forms and also a rough sketch of a wireframe of the app. Some random ideas that i had to generate the content, besides the one where the user takes a photo, are a spinning wheel (like the Wheel of Fortune), with various options to generate the content like: ‘content based on favourite colour’ ; ‘content based on your initials’; ‘first city visited’. I want to keep the options as simple as possible so that the user would not need to think too much, bearing in mind that the target audience is very broad, and that the users would probably be on-the-go… or simply bored. (Yes, also considering boredom).
For such an app, I think the biggest challenge to sort of ‘lure’ the user to use it. As once they are using it, the important thing is to keep the app interface intuitive and easy to use, so that the users can easily navigate from one part to the other.
Some Ideas for Engagement
As already mentioned, one of the ideas is that of the spinning wheel with different options. The goal here is that, let us say you are in a place where taking pictures is not allowed, like waiting room, or you are indeed sitting in an empty room with nothing to do, this allows the user different ways of generating content, unless of course the user just types in something in the search or just goes in the feed.
Another idea that I am thinking of including has to do with first time users. Similar to other visual content sharing apps, after installing the app for the first time, the user is prompted with a few questions (five questions tops) about their personal taste. The questions are in multiple choice format to maximise ease of use.
This other idea that I would like to include in the app somehow, is that of interactive “movies”. I mentioned something like this in previous posts, and also adds to the trends of “meditative museums”. I am using the term ‘movies’ rather loosely here, as being included in an app for a museum, I think that it can also be described as a ‘tour’ also. Anyway, the point here is that the user chooses to watch one of these movies, however, the user gets to choose what direction the story takes. There will be prompts to which the user can choose, and the story will follow accordingly. Keeping in with the theme of the museum, let us say that the user chooses to ‘Apollo 11 space launch’. The user can choose to be with the astronauts, or in the control centre; choose to explore different parts of the time capsule and such things. This can work on the phone, with or without the use of VR. If using VR, 360o filming would work very well for this concept.
