Course: Mobile Applications in IOS
Role: UX Designer / Swift Engineer
Team: Nupur Maheshwari and Mohona Sengupta
Objectives:
When Nupur and I sat down on the first day of class, our professor simply told us: "create an application." We knew it had to answer a specific pain point, be attractive to some target base, or be technically complicated in some way, but Nupur and I had no other guidelines. We sat down together and went through our days, trying to find problems that would be served better by an application.
Our ideas were vast and sometimes pretty crazy, but we landed on a few solid ideas. From there, we did some rapid user testing via Google Forms, asking people how necessary these ideas really were, and our findings helped us finally choose Outrun.
Outrun is an application to motivate users to focus on having fun outdoors. It will ask the user for some preferences and map out a local walking route, then it will guide the user through the walk while playing the game itself, a “zombie apocalypse” game set in Pittsburgh where the user must “slash”, “duck”, and “tap” different items placed in an AR environment to survive the end of days.
Our second deliverable was focused on the front end of our application. We first created a series of low fidelity wireframes, trying to focus on core functionality and the best way to guide the user through this application without having to explain every single step.
Our application is a very kinetic game, so we cut out each screen and pasted them to a piece of cardboard. We then asked our interviewees to literally move through the application while holding their “phone”, and run around pretending to see the zombies through their camera during the game portion of the application.
Feedback:
Our Changes:
We knew that we had to rely on external API and libraries in order to really bring this game to life. In particular: Google Places API, Google Maps API, and the RealityKit extension that Apple provides. In terms of heavy programming, the densest parts of Outrun are: 1) the route creation and guidance and 2) the AR game itself. For this deliverable, we created a Swift file proving that we could satisfactorily access both the Places API and the Maps API, and use the information provided.
Finally, with our user experience locked in and some experience in the API, we began work on the actual application itself. We were able to build out a working prototype with the following features:
We delivered our final product in a pitch to a panel of judges in a class-wide compeitition hosted by the Capital One Technology Group. Hoping to differentiate ourselves with the fun, goofy aesthetic and interesting gameplay, we outlined our business decisions and timeline throughout the project. On the left, you can see our pitch itself, while the right is the demo video we presented.
While our app has a long, long way to go before we can release it on the Apple App Store, we were incredbily proud of the work we were able to do in just a few months. Nupur and I won the "Quicksilver" creativity award during the case compeitition.