Monthly Archives: November 2014

Users

We identified three core user experiences of the NYC subway system. We aim to make all of them experts of the space.

Aware

This is the user who has traveled the MTA many, many times. They are well-informed on how to navigate the system. Their experience can be enhanced through the discovery of unique qualities of the neighborhoods they pass through but never visit.

Example: West-coast transplant living in Sunset Park, who works in Midtown and has never been to Jay Street.

Familiar

This user has traveled some of the lines of the MTA, but still gets lost or feels uncertain when navigating to a new place. Their experience can be enhanced by giving them more and more context as to where they are.

Example: Resident of Stonybrook who comes into the city on weekends to hang out with his friends. He knows how to get to Penn Station, but after a night at the bar, he has trouble making it to the Lower East Side.

Exploratory

This user has never visited the city, and is still trying to figure out how to navigate the city while underground. They are easily disoriented, but also want to explore and get around on their own. Their experience can be enhanced by developing comprehension of the subway system.

Example: A couple from South Korea who are staying at the Ace hotel, and want to explore Central Park, the Lower East Side, and Williamsburg. They can identify the grungier, downtown neighborhoods from their favorite film, Cloverfield.

Defining Our Intervention

A multimedia display that resides on the subway platform for both users who are on the platform as well as those users within the subway trains. In order to honestly reflect the dynamic landscape of New York City, we are pulling media content from social media feeds that are geo located. By doing this we can create a non-narrative means of conveying information about place.

Studio Prototype

New Intervention

Our next steps are to define the borders of our chosen four stations, from there we’ll collect photos that are pulled from social media from within those boundaries (Flickr) and also pull from our own explorations. Once we have the content we will be testing this media within the constraints of our space (subway) in controlled environments (IxD studio), aiming to develop a visual language that evokes a sense of place for each subway stop.

Creation Myth

Why is there such an immense sense of wonder within New York City? The neighborhoods, the shops, the sights, and the people that form all of it. Each place within NYC is distinct making the city a living and changing organism of places.

Imagine that sense of place under city where we travel. The subway.

A  family from Texas are visiting NYC and they’re on the subway looking for to eat NYC food, but have no idea where to go or what to do. As the train stops at Union Square, the family hears from the train that there’s a famous market here. With their interests piqued, they decide to get off and check out the market.

Sitting across from the family is a lady from Brooklyn who really never goes anywhere besides home and work. Suddenly, she see beautiful imagery of Union Square blazed across the station. Taken by the imagery, she decides to get off to see more of what’s going on around this stop.

Standing and holding on to the rail next to the Brooklynite is a young man from Queens, who is looking a little bit confused. Turns out he’s a little bit lost, because he rarely, if ever, comes down to this area of Manhattan, but he wants to check out the skateboarding scene. However, he can’t seem to  remember the name of the place, but does kind of know what it looks like from photos from social media circles. Getting off the stop at Union Square, he heads over to a display showing him photos of the surrounding area from social media sites. This confirms that he’s at the right spot and he leaves the station to see Union Square for himself.

Our subway is made up of points, but New York City is made up of places.

Our subway is now made of places.

6 Week Plan

Week 1 Final Testing, Content Strategy, and Finalize User Journey

Week 2 Content Generation/Gathering and Finalizing Medium

Week 3 First Implementation and Refinement

Week 4 Second Implementation and Refinement

Week 5 Final Implementation and Documentation

Week 6 Create Additional Mock-ups and Finalize Presentation

Our User: The Flatiron Bro
Late 20’s-early 30’s / White collar / Money and time to spend socializing

The Flatiron Bro is a patron of Barcade that uses the space as a place for socializing. He tends to utilize the bar area and tables more than the arcade games. When playing games, they tend to chose the ones with shorter duration and the ability for multiple players. They frequent the bar after work hours and use the space as a meeting ground.

Creation Myth:

Three financial bros walk into Barcade. They are confused by the sight of an 8-year-old boy playing Pac Man at a bar. They walk over to the bartender and look over the drinks menu and decide on a few craft beers. As the bartender pours their drinks, they look around and notice more kids playing the arcade games. Because they are mainly here for the bar, they turn back around and await their drinks, asking each other what all these children are doing at the bar. Their beers arrive and they take their first sip. Slowly, they each feel some tingling in their feet. One finance bro looks to his collegue and sees him slowly transforming into his 8-year-old self. Before he has a chance to react, he himself also changes into his own 8-year-old self. They all race to play X-Men and battle each other with their root beers in tow!

Intervention:

Our intervention is the menu, from our research, we found that, the only time users read the information about the selection of craft beers is when they check the menu. So we designed a pairing menu, with description and image of certain beers matched to arcade games. We imagine when user order a beer they can read the information about the game, which may attract them to play that game.

Testing the Second Prototype:

For our second prototype installed in the IXD studio we decided to bring Barcade to our Thursday night get-together. We wanted to test the assumption that people play games that they have some connection with because of pervious experiences and memories. We chose games our generations might have played growing up: Mario Kart, Tetris, and Lunar Lander…

We found that people gravitated to the games that they knew and then stayed to play the others. Participants gathered around the games which attracted more users and a community formed around playing and talking about the games. Memories were recounted and tips were shared.  While Tetris had the longest game play we found that it encouraged users to compete for a high score and therefore siloed its user. The other two games were a bit more social.

Two New Interventions:

Highlighting a game everyday at the bar, such as telling them the background story of the game, characters, etc, or instructing people on how to play the game. Displaying the highest score and the individual, in order to attract people to a certain game, especially those games that are unfamiliar.

Way-finding system for the arcade games: There is no list of all the games at the physical location. We want to provide a map with a short description of all the games and point out which games are multi or single players. Our assumption is that people will use it during their waiting times at the bar, which will educate them more about the various games.