Week 4

This week was a very busy one, as we continued our research while not forgetting to have fun!

The highlight of the week was when we as a team went out to the Pittsburgh Zoo. Schell Games has an app designed particularly for the Pittsburgh Zoo and the whole experience, so we wanted to try it out and identify its strengths and weaknesses, since we are also creating something very similar (albeit on a smaller scale). The entire afternoon was a fun experience, and accompanied by the app it was a pretty informative one too.

We came back to school and started brainstorming again. We had planned a few playtest sessions at the end of the week, so that we could have something comprehensive to show and talk about during quarters walkarounds, so there was a lot of preparation necessary to go into that. We had decided that we needed feedback on layout and content in the app, so we made 2 different prototypes to walk our guests through. They were in two different styles with varying amount of content and media, and we ported the prototypes on to our phones, so that we could be ready for multiple testers. By the end of our session we had playtested with more ten of our peers who gave us valuable input and suggestions, and things they wished they could do with the application. It was exactly the sort of feedback we required and it will go a long way in helping us shape our product.

We had revisions on branding materials (posters, half sheets, etc) while we also made AR prototypes with Vuforia (along with a sample UI) to demonstrate our idea to outsiders. Next week we start off with quarters, so there’ll be more on that coming up. Stay tuned!