User Experiences Design-Group Project 

Problem Brief
The visitors to Central Park find it easy to get lost in the park and usually hover over certain tourist sites. By conducting primary and secondary research, the team goes through a human-centered design process to examine and redesign the wayfinding experience in Central Park in New York City. The final deliverable is a pop-up scavenger hunt in mid-Central Park and a video showing how users react to this hunt.

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- 01 - Finding pain-points 

Our group went through several rounds of brainstorming and observations in several parks in NYC and decided to put our focus on Central Park and the tourists' interaction within the park. We made a stakeholder map to help us find the direction.

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- 02 - Primary Research

We made two visits to Central Park, observed people in the park, and interviewed some of them:

• Middle Part of Central Park: The perimeter of “The Lake” -> Sights seen Ladies Pavillion, Bow Bridge, Edge of Cherry Hill

• The lower side of Central Park: from the Grand Army Plaza (right side entrance) to Sheep Meadow then walk down along the West Dr

Through observation and interview, we found that

• Central Park is huge and has many road branches.

• Historical Sites in Central Park are not as popular as other site-seeing places.

• People always go to a certain place that they are familiar with.

• Few road signs point directions clearly.

• Architecture signs are too close to the architecture.

• No orientation/direction signs at the crossing.

 

We collected all the information and ideas and used affinity mapping to develop three categories that we are interested in pursuing further: 

1. navigation

2. guided tour/exploration

3. scavenger hunt

Also, we conducted an in-class user testing with professors and classmates to find out what people were interested in.

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- 03 - Scavenger Hunt

Problems we met

• Central Park has too many historical sites, which we couldn't include in one scavenger hunt.​

Based on the two visits to the park, we chose five places in the mid-central park and designed the hunt with the following ideas:

1. hunting goals are to get people to know a. the history/story of the place and b. the way in/out

2. each hunt focuses on one region/place/location

3. hunting contents could include or combine historical info, landmarks, myths, fun facts, seasons, etc.

4. encouraging a phone-free experience/exploration during this hunt

5. clues and riddles lead the hunt

6. using digital signage to show the info

 

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- 04 - Redesign the Hunt

After another round of in-class user testing, we realized that people find our hunting directions and clues too difficult and not clear enough.

By using the Gamification method, we realized that we need to provide users with a clearer hunting structure so that they know where they are and how much left they need to complete. In this way, users will have more patience and pay more attention to the current experiences.

We decided to implement the scavenger hunt in the middle part of Central Park (from a. 72nd - 82nd) and make the hunt a pop-up event that would happen once a month with different themes and hunting routes.

After in-class and on-site prototype usability tests, we refined our design and made the video for our final deliverable.