Unseen Media – Product Research & Design
Unseen Media is a startup focused on delivering augmented reality enabled narrative tabletop games, right to your doorstep. The product is a culmination of a three-month intensive startup accelerator hosted by the NYC Media Lab and RLab.
Project Overview.
Project Research Time: 3 months (September 2018 to November 2018)
Project Design Time: 1 year (January 2019 to January 2020)
Unseen Media is a startup that creates augmented reality enabled tabletop mystery games. The startup went through an intensive 3-month long startup accelerator to refine the product using lean entrepreneurship methodology where we interviewed over 100 potential customers and partners to determine the product-market fit and to solve the needs and problems of potential customers.
Our Solution: After extensive testing of an MVP and interviews, the product evolved from a location-based entertainment (LBE) product to a subscription-based direct delivery product to cater to customers’ needs for social interactions, convenience, and ease of use.
My Role: For this project, I served as UX Researcher & Designer. I took the lead in customer discovery, interviews, testing, and research synthesis. In the Design phase, I served as UX and UI Designer and Prototyper.
The Team: Our startup team consisted of four people. A industrial designer, a 3D modeler, a developer, and myself - a UX designer and researcher.
Customer Research and Synthesis.
Over the course of the Bootcamp, I conducted or helped co-organize 100+ user interviews with prospective customers and partners. These interviews were designed to identify customer pain points and their wants and needs in location-based immersive entertainment experiences.
Over the course of these interviews, we discovered three main points that would cause us to pivot product ideas. In our research, the insights coalesced from our research determined that customers heavily favored experiences that were:
Convenient - They could access it on-demand or at-will.
Social - They could share the experience with friends or family.
Story-driven - A deep narrative was essential in hooking them into further gameplay.
Product Pivot.
With these factors in mind, we pivoted our business idea from a physical, location-based experience to a deliver-to-home experience. As it turns out, while our target segments love going on outings with friends, they love the convenience of at-home experiences more.
At this point, we had enough customer interviews to interpret these trends and our next steps with the product pivot was to do competitive research on similar experiences.
Competitive Analysis.
As part of our research after our product pivot, we conducted a competitive analysis on similar products. We purchased and played games from Hunt A Killer, The Mysterious Package Company, and Breakout Games to get a better sense of how gameplay was presented in each of their deliver-to-home games.
Some of our findings include:
The games have a linear story path but players discover story pieces in a non-linear fashion.
Games start from the physical box but traverse multiple mediums including social media and websites.
Social Media and Website elements are created specifically for the game and does not rely on existing websites from third-parties.
Sketching Concepts.
We took our learnings from playing games and applied it to our concept. Combined with our user research, we knew we had to create a tactile and fulfilling experience.
For my part, I started sketching potential AR interfaces and web interfaces that could potentially be used in our product.
Designing Augmented Reality Experiences.
Designing augmented reality experiences presented a unique challenge and represented a departure from traditional design principles for screens. To guide my thinking and checked out a lot of augmented reality experiences from Pokémon GO to IKEA Place.
Here are some of the design principles that helped guide me after synthesizing my learnings from these AR apps and experiences:
Spatial Awareness - the consideration of physical space when designing AR experiences.
Appropriate Navigation - using the navigational techniques best suited for the designed medium.
Reality Integration - merging realities by linking the Digital to the Physical.
Testing and Feedback.
We tested the first prototype of our product at various events hosted by RLab. Users included AR/VR enthusiast non-gamers and occasionally board and tabletop gamers with families. These testing sessions included limited gameplay.
Some of the feedback we received include:
Tactile experiences made the game feel more real and connected to our reality.
AR tools were constrained to newer devices because of the SDKs that we were using. Some folks on older devices would be prevented from playing if they bought the game.
AR tools and web interfaces were simple to navigate given the limited amount of interactions available.
Product Iteration.
Through multiple rounds of testing and feedback, we iterated the product a few times to arrive to a box case-based design. The AR and web tools also saw further iteration in terms of software, UI, and layout.
Some of the feedback we based our iteration to a box case-based design include:
Everything coming in an envelope feels cheap.
Durability of the envelope case over time was a concern.
Some folks wanted to display the game, and being in an envelope means there’s no nice case to look at.
Building Web AR Prototype Tools.
As the physical product saw iteration, so too, did the Augmented Reality tools. Since one of the a big insights we learned from customer feedback was concerns about running the experience, we decided to host the AR tools on the web instead of an app that would leverage Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore.
Some of the feedback we received as we built and iterated the web AR tools include:
At some stages, some folks weren’t clear on how to advance to the next stage. We added iconography and additional, simple, on-screen instructions.
Some folks would need help and additional information to explain what exactly it is they were doing. We added a help modal for additional information.
Mobile AR UI Mock-ups.
After the prototype tools were tested for usability, I iterated the high fidelity UI mock-ups to help further guide the implementation of our AR tools.
As our AR tools utilized a phone’s web browser, it was necessary to keep UI elements simple to ensure they would fit on all screen aspect ratios across iOS and Android devices.
Feedback from Attending AR/VR Conferences.
AR/VR Expos and Conferences allowed us to access industry members from technology providers to business and marketing folks. In fact, we were even able to show our game to our web AR technology provider, 8th Wall. They noted that they’ve never seen a game built on their technology before.
Given the larger and more diverse audience, we did not receive as much product and gameplay feedback. However, we did receive a lot of constructive to further advance our business goals from product launch to product marketing.
Some of this feedback includes:
Potential partnerships with online influencers as product launch nears.
Working with educational institutions to develop content to meet education goals using this product form factor.
Potential partnerships with media companies to integrate this product form factor utilizing the company’s intellectual property.
Testing & Feedback at Gaming Expos.
Gaming Expos gave us a fantastic opportunity to test with gamers at a larger scale. We attended Gaming Expos in New York City to promote ourselves as well as to demo a new 15-20 minute condensed version of the product that would utilize all the gameplay elements that would be present in our game.
We received excellent feedback on our demo that we could take back and integrate into our full-fledged game. Some of the feedback includes:
The social media handle that was decoded (grntrvlangl) seemed like another coded clue
Many participants have never played a transmedia game and thought it was really cool to use social media, websites, texting, and AR.
AR appeared to be more intuitive to many of the participants when it was framed as “detective tools.”