Lincoln Park Zoo App
I collaborated on this project with a team of peers while enrolled in DePaul University's Human Computer Interaction graduate program. Our objective was to create a navigation hierarchy and task based prototype for a mobile application that supports Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo.
Goals
In order to meet our objective my team aimed to reach the following goals:
- Design the information architecture for the app based strongly on user input through interviews and card sorting activities
- Created a prototype to model the two primary user tasks of finding an animal exhibit and purchasing tickets to a zoo event
Target Audience
Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo attracts visitors from all walks of life but for the scope of our projects we focused on users that fit the following criteria:
- Age 18-65
- Daily mobile device user
- Comfortable using GPS services on their mobile device
- Have visited the Lincoln Park Zoo
Interviews
My team and I conducted interviews with eight participants that fit our target audience to discovers the the main objectives and motivations of users when they visit the Lincoln Park Zoo. The interview was comprised of five warm-up questions, five general questions, four deep focus questions, and two wrap up questions. The interviews gave us insight into our target demographic's zoo visiting behaviors and the results influenced the features and categories used in our card sorts.
Card Sorts and Site Map
My team conducted an open card sort with eight participants. There were 70+ cards in the open card sort and we used the results to preform a hybrid card sort with nineteen participants. Below is the resulting standardization grid that heavily influenced the design of our site map.
User Personas
To help my team empathize and anticipate the needs of our target users we created two user personas based on data from our interviews. Nathan Navigator is a married father of two who wants to take his family to the Lincoln Park Zoo. Because the zoo is very large he is concerned about finding all the animals he family wants to see in one trip. Eve Event is a young professional that needs to buy tickets to the Lincoln Park Zoo's annual Beer Lights event for a work outing. She wants to purchase tickets to the event in advance and not risk the event selling out the day of.
USER SCENARIOS
We then wrote brief user scenarios to help us conceptualize how a typical user might use our application. In Nathan Navigator's scenario we walked through the steps a user may take to download the app, search for animal exhibit, view the exhibit's information and location on a map, and view walking directions to the exhibit's location.
For Eve Event's scenario we described how a user would download the app, search for events, view the event information, and purchase tickets for the event. Developing the user personas and scenarios helped us prioritize features we decided to test in our app’s prototype as well as think though task workflows.
Sketches and Wire Frames
My team and I made wire frame sketches based on the information we gathered from the card sorts, site map, and user personas and scenarios. We then reviewed elements from each individual wireframes and decided which layouts and elements might be best understood by users, and using Photoshop merged the strongest elements into a a low fidelity prototype.
Usability Test
My team developed a low-to-mid-fidelity prototype in InVision and ran usability tests with ten participants. Each usability test consisted of two tasks. The first task involved participants navigating through the app to find information on the camel exhibit and pull up walking directions through the map feature. In the second task, we asked participants to find information for the Beer Lights event and purchase tickets.
Our usability test participants encountered no major problems in completing their assigned tasks and all participants completed the tasks. There was some confusion resulting from our prototype not being fully developed but this only caused slight delays and did not prevent the participants from completing their tasks. The average time of completion for the first task was 3 minutes and 55 seconds. The average time of completion for the second task was 2 minute and 21 seconds. We conducted post-test interviews with each participant and gathered data which suggested that our participants felt comfortable with the prototype. From our data analysis we believed the data indicated that our goal of designing information architecture for the app that allows users to intuitively complete the two tasks was met.
