Story Hunt is a mobile scavenger hunt application designed for families and friends, granting them an unique outdoor activity that turns any physical location into a social adventure experience while capturing what is most important to them - unforgettable memories.
Story Hunt is a personal project I created as a part of the CareerFoundry UX bootcamp to demonstrate my ability in utilizing the design thinking process and my mastery of common UX design methods and tools.
The aim of this project was to have an ambitious UX/UI design project I can add to my professional portfolio. The problem I wanted to solve is to enable people to enjoy innovative social scavenger hunts whenever and wherever they want.
Creating the application from scratch I applied the Design Thinking Process, allowing me to explore and define the problem space in order to discover innovative solutions.
I began the project by building an overall understanding of the scavenger hunt problem space and collecting initial ideas about which problems I could tackle with my application. By researching scavenger hunt games, brainstorming, and conducting a competitive analysis I was able to identify some challenges and opportunities tied to the activity.
I analyzed and created a SWOT profile for two scavenger hunt app competitors and performed a UX analysis to further understand what solutions were already existing on the market, what users might expect, and where there are opportunities for my application.
If players just want to quickly jump into a well-designed scavenger hunt they have to visit a certain location, which the hunt was specifically created for.
Adding game content that dynamically adjusts to the user’s environment would allow for much more flexibility in terms of where you could play.
As the hunts and their content are strongly tailored to a specific location, games quickly become repetitive and lack replayability.
Randomized challenges or a selection of unique story-driven games could help locations stay attractive as a playing area more than once.
Existing apps handle it well to let others easily join games as guest players. However, they require the creator of a game to have his team already set up.
Adding a feature that allows users to share and join games to find others to play with, could greatly improve the experience for everyone that struggles with finding fellow players.
In general, a scavenger hunt sounds like quite a fun adventure. Comparing it to other forms of modern-day entertainment the challenges and content struggle to keep up with the excitement though.
Making use of modern technologies like augmented reality, seen in applications such as Pokemon Go, Instagram, or Snapchat, has a lot of potential to innovate the experience and increase the excitement especially for a younger audience.
Even though there are tools that help you quickly set up a combination of challenges for a scavenger hunt, making a high-quality and enjoyable game tends to be a time-consuming undertaking for users.
Providing users a toolkit of customizable and uniquely themed challenges could speed up the process while ensuring enjoyable and entertaining content and still allowing organizers to explore their creativity.
With the research findings and insights, I narrowed down in which context my application would be used and what problems it was trying to solve.
Story Hunt is mainly targeted at families and friends who enjoy exploring their area via interactive social games. The app focuses on a gaming audience that mostly includes younger people aged around 10 to 40 years.
Story Hunt's key features are a quick and simple way to set up and play a game, a story-driven tasks system, which utilizes augmented reality technology, and a social area to plan games and invite players as well as finding and sharing games to make new friends.
Story Hunt will use geographic information system mapping, which enables users to play at a wide range of possible locations. Setting up a game can be done at any time, and once a game is active, it’s expected that users would set aside time to perform the actual game as an outdoor activity with a group of people.
There is a wide variety of group activities, but Story Hunt grants families and friends a unique and entertaining outdoor activity that turns any physical location into a social adventure experience.
Moving forward I conducted 4 remote interviews with existing and potential users through Skype and phone to uncover their wants and needs, motivations as well as pain points related to the product I was going to design.
I then sorted my findings from the interviews with an affinity map. In total I found 6 clusters giving me insight about location, planning, family desires, connecting, memories and activities. On top of the insights, I also created some initial ideas on how I could solve these problems.
People prefer activities that require less planning, as they tend to make decisions spontaneously and like to be flexible.
The app’s hunts should be playable anywhere and anytime, while also allowing games to be paused and continued as the user wishes. This should be achievable by pulling map data from services like Google Maps and adjusting the hunt map to the user’s location.
Pictures and videos play an essential role in how people keep their memories, as they allow them to revisit and share these moments.
The hunt’s tasks should be built around taking pictures and videos to capture and record their experience as memories.
People are seeking a break from everyday life through exciting adventures that involve exploring places, solving puzzles, and uncovering surprises.
The app can involve gamification elements and motivators to create an engaging experience different from everyday life.
People prefer working as a team, as they want to avoid that someone might feel left out.
The hunts should be based on teamwork and could additionally feature a role system that ensures tasks will involve everyone.
Based on the data and synthesized insights I collected from my user interviews, I defined the two user personas, Stefano and Kathrin. This step helped me to further establish empathy with my target audience and prioritize my app’s functionality with my personas’ needs and goals in mind.
Before starting with the ideation phase, I created a journey map for each of my personas to visualize the processes they would go through when using my application to accomplish their goal. With the journey map, I was also able to uncover a few more opportunities for my application, helping me to further define the functionality of my app.
I created user flows for the 3 key objectives of my personas, setting up a hunt, sharing media, and planning a hunt as well as 2 additional flows for completing a task and finishing the hunt in order to define how the entire experience would play out. In the process, I discovered from my users’ point of view what screens are needed to achieve their goal before working on the information architecture.
View user flows pdf
Setting up the information architecture for my app I created a draft of my sitemap and evaluated it by conducting a digital card sort with 9 participants over Optimal Sort. The goal of this test was to identify patterns that could solidify the established structure of my app and give insights into how it could be improved.
Ruling out some minor issues that were caused by confusing descriptions of the cards, the majority of participants created the 6 major clusters Gallery, Onboarding, Settings, Planner, Create Game, and Game Details. Overall the initial sitemap aligned mostly with the results, except for a few smaller adjustments I made.
To put together and test all the groundwork I’ve made so far, it was time to create a prototype of my app. The prototyping was a lot of a back and forth process. I created hand-sketched low-fidelity wireframes with a focus on high-level functionality and continuously modified, extended, and increased the level of fidelity using Adobe XD until I had a test-ready interactive MVP.
View wireframes pdf
I performed a usability test with 6 participants, one moderated in-person and the other five moderated remotely through Skype or Zoom. Afterward, I sorted the feedback and grouped similar thoughts and errors of each participant with an affinity map. In a rainbow spreadsheet, I then listed my findings and used Jakob Nielsen’s rate scale to rank the errors after their severity. This helped me to prioritize which parts of the design are most urgent to be iterated on.
Lastly, I designed a high-fidelity UI for my application and documented my decisions in a design system guide. To bridge the gap between UX design thinking and the visual UI design for Story Hunt, I used a creative process called Stylescapes. With it I explored a certain look and feel for my app by carefully collecting a combination of images into a mood board, giving a high fidelity glimpse into the visual direction I would be heading.
View design system pdf
My objective was to transfer the scavenger hunt concept into an innovative and up-to-date format that serves families and friends as an entertaining and easy to set up social outdoor activity. My biggest challenge was that my research was too focused on family activities and barely on activities around friends. In the short time, I also picked some interviewees who weren’t acquainted with scavenger hunt games. As a workaround, I referred to similar activities they were familiar with, like Geocaching, Pokemon Go, or escape rooms.
As a result, I like how I was able to bridge the gap from a solely entertainment-based game to an application that delivers users’ intrinsic value through socializing aspects and a task and reward system that is all about getting together with your loved ones and capturing those moments.
Moving forward I would prototype the functionality to let users share their games as well as allowing them to join others through an available hunts list. There is also still the need to flesh out the flows for the settings and their contents and create the missing tasks for the first story to complete the hunt experience. In terms of research, I’d like to test Story Hunt in an ethnographic field study to see how it performs in a more realistic scenario.
Cork Pith Helmet by VitaminCo
Aviator headset WW2 by Aleksey Yorzh
Hat by Sergey Korotkikh
Bundle of Rope by Padraig McAlister
Cigar by Hum3D
The Idol by Aurore Valat-Marty
Golden clapper board by Sashkin7
Moustache by bariacg
Pana by Storyset
Crashed Plane by Joakim Olofsson
Alien Invasion by Ryan Hall
The Isle by Lorenzo Nuti
Jurassic Nature by Nikolay Razuev
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