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Fostering more intimate relationships between people and their locations

Designer

Kekeli Sackey

Case Study / Dec 7, 2022

Tools

Figma, Dovetail

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Content

03 The problem space

08 Research

18 Designing the solution

29 Outcomes

34 Reflections

28 Appendix

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Kekeli Sackey |

Understanding the problem space

02

The problem

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Learning history should be fun, interactive and immersive.

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While pictures provide a much-needed context to those learning history, it’s still a limited experience that doesn’t fully take the learner on a journey to the past. Allowing people to interact with historical artifacts in real time would make for richer, more immersive experience.

Above: King Behanzin of Dahomey

Left: Soundjata ou l'épopée mandingue, Tamsir Niane Djibril

Kekeli Sackey |

The vision

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A user experience that allows people to explore their history independently of location so they can reconnect with their surroundings in a more intimate fashion

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Who stands to benefit?

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• Travellers, people to like to explore their surroundings
• People who want to learn about the history of places where they live

Kekeli Sackey

The how

03

Leveraging AR for storytelling

Today…

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AR tech superimposes computer-generated images over the real world and allows users to learn and practice new skills in real-time. Unlike VR, which requires headsets, AR experiences are accessible on mobile, allowing more people to explore on their own, independent of location.

• AR is used in many industries including healthcare, education, gaming and retail
• The education market is considered a top-three promising area of development for AR and VR technology. Source: Augmented Reality in Education: Interactive Classrooms | Maryville Online
• The AR and the VR market is set to reach $856.2 Billion by 2031 (Source: Allied Market Research, Article

Pokemon Go, AR game

Kekeli Sackey |

Initial assumptions and constraints

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Assumptions

Goals and outcomes

• People can virtually explore locations they can't go to due to various reasons (archeological preservation, limited capacity)
• Increased engagement with historical materials
• Users can experience their community’s history without planning a museum trip

Constraints

• Project timeline
• Building an AR experience that includes photos and videos
• Asking and getting permission to use copyrighted materials

Above: Chernobyl, example of inaccessible site

Kekeli Sackey |

Research

04

Competitive Analysis

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Kinfolk

Wonderscope

Mauer

Insights

Interactions

1) Reliance on phones for immersive experiences lead to fatigue.

2) Users can’t use more than one surface at a time. AR apps have a requirement to choose a ‘placement’ for the story/experience before it begins. Users can’t use more than one surface at a time. Moving the device mid-experience causes users to lose their position in the story and choose another placement to continue the interaction.

3) Zooming in and out is replaced with physical navigation to and around elements, which is counter intuitive when the convention on screens is to zoom in and out.

Usability

1) Gestures and Interactions are not intuitive and rely on trial and error

2) AR apps that focus on history feel like add-on experiences to complement existing ones. (Eg., BBC Civilisation AR, Skins and Bones)

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11

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Most mobile phones on the market today have little to no environmental perception capabilities. The experiences these phones offer can't mix physical and digital realities.

Microsoft on Mixed Reality

Kekeli Sackey |

User Interviews

05

Research Goals & Participants

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Research goals

Part 1

• Gain a deeper understanding of the constraints surrounding AR experiences in the e-learning space
• Understand the constraints faced by those who build these experiences

Part 2

• To access whether cultural knowledge preservation is a viable use case for AR
• How are africans keeping in touch with their country’s history today?

Methodologies

• 45 mins qualitative interviews: 1-1
• Competitive analysis
• SME interviews
• Secondary research on the use case of e-learning with AR

User Groups

• People who have used AR apps for e-learning
• People who have used AR to create learning content
• Togolese people
• Other Africans
• Subject Matter Experts

Research Participants

Number of participants: 8

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Kekeli Sackey |

Understanding the constraints surrounding AR experiences in the e-learning space

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Key Learnings

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What they identified as areas of improvements

• Voice assistance to improve the experience
• Getting people to the content faster by reducing the multi-step process to get there.
• Smaller devices, devices with better camera

How they use it

• Research participants use AR apps for education and entertainment.
• App usage frequency varies per context. For participants who use it to learn history, usage frequency is irregular, as they go back to it every now and then to learn something new. Those who downloaded AR apps for educational purposes are usually instructed to use the apps, so there’s an incentive to keep up with grades.

What they like about AR apps

• Better retention and information recall when it’s used for learning
• Interactions make games more engaging

What they dislike

• Poor UX: Some apps are not easy to navigate. Often, the experience feels disjointed and unrealistic when the content quality is poor. Additionally, the experience feels laggy when you’re interacting with the interface, causing a disruptive experience
• Location dependency: Some apps require you to be at a specific location, which is not ideal if you don’t want to travel or move around.
• Over reliance on phones is cumbersome because you’d have to carry your phone around to experience AR
• For creators, there’s a multi-step process to get people to the content.
• Battery Drainage: AR apps slow down phone battery limiting the amount of time one can use to enjoy a full immersive experience.

Kekeli Sackey |

15

“

It's a very useful way of learning because having a pictorial representation in your mind helps to build your knowledge and remember, and it helps you remember what it looks like. And I think even after a longer period of time, you can easily recall this.

User Interview, Participant 1

Kekeli Sackey |

Assessing the viability of using AR for cultural preservation

Key Learnings

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Participants Profile

• Africans, and africans in the diaspora

How they stay connected to their history

• People in the diaspora use social media to continue learning about their country’s history. Also use podcasts.
• People want an easier way to transfer knowledge to their children.

How would they use it

• Revisit historical figures and ask them questions about why certain things happened

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For the sake of our kids who will be needing to know more about history, I wish there would be a better way to break it down to them.

User Interview - Participant 5

Kekeli Sackey |

Designing the solution

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Ideation

Map view: the map view allows the user to view and interact with points of interest

AR mode: User navigates their neighborhood in AR mode and see how some areas used to look like in the past

Gallery mode: allows users to view and read more about the place’s history

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Above: A low-fidelity ideation of the experience

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Key features from first round of ideation

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1

3

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Kekeli Sackey |

Content presentation

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I looked at examples that blend the old and the new

Source: Dr Belinda Kendall, Linkedin

Kekeli Sackey |

Navigation

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I looked at navigation patterns in familiar interfaces and games

Source: Minimap in the Witcher 3

Source: Google maps AR

Design concept (mine)

Kekeli Sackey |

Prototyping interactions

Incorporating icons into the videos

Adding interaction to figma

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Kekeli Sackey

Insights from user testing

1. Lack of context: People expect to see more information about the location they visit
2. Poor navigation makes it difficult to go through the prototype
3. Interactions were not user friendly Participants expect to zoom in and out of the experience

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Recommendations & Next steps

• Include onboarding steps in the process
• Include relevant nav CTAs so people can easily get through the user flows

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22

Kekeli Sackey

23

“

I really, really love this concept. I don't have, again, I don't have all the context, but I love what you're doing. I love how direct it looks real easy. It looks clean. Besides some of the confusions I have, I think you're onto something really, really cool. I've never seen this, I've never heard of it. I've seen AR in use in like different, so many different use cases, but I've never seen this. And I think there's a lot of value.

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I think of myself as a tourist and I'm visiting certain places how useful I would or how much I would enjoy using something like this. Or even as a local, a lot of times we walk around places where we really don't know the grounds we stand on or the buildings where you walk by and how educated this would be. So cool stuff

Usability Testing, Participant 2

Kekeli Sackey |

24

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I would love to see this in real life.

Usability Testing, Participant 3

Kekeli Sackey |

25

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It's just like an intimate way for me to travel by walking. So having an app like this, I believe, not only does it show me what's nearby right away as I'm using it, but like it teaches me about the history of the area. Nice. And I don't need to like get a tour guide because the app is my tour guide.

Usability Testing, Participant 4

Kekeli Sackey |

Outcomes

07

Prototypes & Reflections

Interaction breakdown

Tap the screen to start exploring

Video plays and point of interest appears

User taps the screen and is prompted to place the artifact

User views gallery artifact

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Kekeli Sackey

High-fidelity designs

28

View prototypes here

Kekeli Sackey

Reflections

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How insights influenced the direction of my thesis

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To avoid friction in the experience, I focused on:

• Using familiar UX patterns: the user starts with a map
• Embedding the AR onboarding into the overall experience. Most AR apps start with onboarding the user about AR technology. Research has shown that this creates friction in the experience. Source: Nielsen Norman Group, AR-Onboarding Walkthroughs in Mobile Apps

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Challenges

• Designing AR experiences in Figma
• Scaling down the project due to time and prioritizing the most impactful features

Kekeli Sackey |

Reflections & Next Steps

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• When it comes to onboarding, AR calibration and onboarding doesn’t need to feel like a chore. That experience can still be designed in a way that feels seamless to the user

Next Steps

• Refine the animations and update graphics
• Explore ways to incorporate haptic feedback
• Define how this could be build

Kekeli Sackey |

Thanks for reading! 🥳

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Appendix

• Research Plan
• Project Plan
• Interview notes

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Readings and sources

• (PDF) Archeoguide: An augmented reality guide for archaeology sites
• Augmented Reality in Education: Interactive Classrooms | Maryville Online
• 7 Augmented Reality Tools for the Classroom
• Wonderscope
• https://augmented-classroom.com/
• Historical Storytelling Through Augmented Reality - IBI Group
• Historik app uses AR to combine the modern world with historical events, landmarks
• Augmented Reality Disadvantages - Read Before You Adopt | Aircada Pro.
• GitHub - microsoft/MixedRealityToolkit-Unity: Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) provides a set of components and features to accelerate cross-platform MR app development in Unity.
• https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ar-walkthroughs/?lm=ar-calibration&pt=article
• https://arvr.google.com/experiences/

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Kekeli Sackey |