Navigation for new settlers / tourists has always been challenging, but Google Maps has been one stop application for all. This project aims is to build upon Google map’s existing live view feature to simply the onboarding experience of new comers in a city.
View Process Deck
We kicked off this project by trying to simplify the subway experience in New York City, but ended up with designing an onboarding transportation experience for new settlers in the city in Google Maps. The revised goal of the project was to design public transport navigation for travellers on a short visit.
UX Research • UX Design • Interaction Design • Usability Testing
June - August 2020
Micronavigation through AR Cards
Lines, numbers, and colors mean different things to people used to a different transport system. With subway micro navigation, a user needs to only worry about his next steps. You can now onboard faster without being delayed by deciphering signboards.
The filter chips are an addition that can add delight to the user's journey. Users in AR mode can set filters to see relevant content. For example, travelers can discover and learn about the culture through the AR culture filter.
Breadcrumbs will guide you home: AR Anchor Cards
New settlers can navigate to a common meeting place by requesting AR anchor powered directions from a friend or an acquaintance.
A friend or an acquaintance can help someone with the location by providing them with user-generated anchor points. This feature is based on user behavior of navigating based on landmarks or places of significance.
Polaroids in the Air: AR Memories
Taking the concept further, AR polaroid could also be used as a private photo map feature. Bilal could record his experiences of visiting a new place on the map. When he later visits the place again, he can relive the experience by comparing old photos with the real location.
This gives Bilal a chance to reminisce, share experience that feel lived in and form a stronger tie with Google products.
A friend who is a new settler in New York, had recently come to start his journey as a graduate student. While having casual conversations with him, he often expressed his frustration of getting confused while figuring out the public transportation in New York.We saw this as an interesting design opportunity and started to dig deeper into the issue.
To understand the problem at hand, We conducted desk research, collected survey results, interviewed New Yorkers and evaluated navigation applications used in New York. From our research we uncovered that a lot of factors play into making navigation difficult for a new settler.
(4 application)
(6 sessions)
(52 responses)
(Multiple Sources)
Contextual information reduces cognitive overload.
“When I first came here, it was very overwhelming. Once I was right at the location, but took 30 minutes to reach my destination”
Experiences in a new city might lead to cultural shocks.
“Homelessness, street and subway performances are part of the New York lifestyle, but when I first came here, it was very terrifying for me.”
Google maps need to strike a balance between standard and personalized features.
“Color coding means something else in New Delhi metro, while it is completely different for New York subway”
Maps needs to break down the user journey to make it more digestible.
“I only care about what my next step should be. Sometimes it becomes a lot to take.”
We started off by designing for maps on smart watches initially, but through research we realized we were not focusing on the right problem.
We were trying to solve for route delays.
Things that apps cannot solve.
Recommendations, service aggregation, and offline use.
Already Supported by Google.
Support for cultural learning as a pre-travel step.
People would rarely use it.
After we conducted research we realized that maybe we were focusing on the lesser issues. We were trying to make delays communication better, advocating for aggregation of services and make cultural information available as a travel guide.
We realized that these solutions were either already implemented or won't be impactful. After Affinity mapping and concept generation we revisited the problem and revised our design goals.
How might we provide onboarding support for people with limited knowledge about the city?
How might we improve the navigation by drawing more from user behavior?
How might we normalize cultural differences for tourists/new settlers for a short visit?
We finalized on contextual navigation with just in time information that was only possible through augmented reality and location anchors.
Furthermore, using AR based cards opened up possibilities to improve navigation and culture normalization through personalized directions and photo sharing respectively.
Bilal recently moved to NYC from a small town in Europe. He needs to figure out his way around the city along with adjusting to his new life.
Build a new mental model, Balance between work and settling in, Balance between ensuring safety and exploring the city.
No social connection, Adapting to new culture, Language barrier, Need for belonging, danger to self/belongings.
To form our guiding principles, we used idea mash up where we formed crazy solutions to solve for very real problems. Although These solutions were far from implementable, we formed solid principles we would like our final solution to use
Out of all our ideas, there was a clear indication that we could not solve for all the physical problems existing in the public transport. We needed to add a digital layer to simplify the experience for our users.
The subway navigation cards were designed to provide contextual information to new settlers like Bilal. Each card consists of information that the user might need to make decision at that particular instance of the journey.
The initial card design lacked visual hierarchy and the information was not grouped in a way to give users information at one glance. The revised cards har better hierarchy, were easy to follow can consisted of subway car suggestion as well based on crowdsourced data.
The initial card design did not give enough information about the system status. The revised card allowed users to view a snapshot of the location of the sender. By making this interaction, user would be assured that he would be travelling to the right location.
To help the user get a sense of anchor points, the steps & more showed the anchor points. However, there was no visual information present on the map to show the personal anchor points. The revised design show cased flags on the map which served as a visual indicator for the anchor points left behind by the creator.
Taking the concept further, AR polaroid could also be used as a private photo map feature. Bilal could record his experiences of visiting a new place on the map.When he later visits the place again, he can relive the experience by comparing old photos with the real location.
Ensuring feature discoverability was a challenge. Knowing that Google Maps is complex and has different moving parts, we had to map the entry point for our features to that of the underlying feature supporting it.
While exploring the concept of micro navigation, we were able to expand the concept to build upon the features already offered by Google Maps. Micro navigation for instance could be merged with personal location sharing and Local guides.
We were at point in our design process where all of what we thought fell apart. This project taught me that you can never predict your solution until you conduct your ground work well. It is then that you realize the true requirements and trusting the research process goes a long way.
