GPS treasure hunting game -
Interface design from scratch for iPad Mini tablet.
Tick Tock Unlock, a pioneering British escape room game company approached me to expand their experience offering with a new game type: GPS treasure hunting - a fun, family-friendly gaming experience combining real life landmarks with a digital interface.
Aimed at city explorers, mental challenges are set by the app in relation to the physical landscape, giving players fun visual and knowledge-based tasks to complete. This was the client’s first foray into digital gaming - with my expertise in both UX and game design I was ready to create a great product for them.
With the client forfeiting user research, I had the challenge of understanding how the app should be designed: a competitor analysis gave me insight into how existing products presented their offering. I ran through competitor’s games to learn what makes the essence of this type of product. With the client we determined the best features to achieve what the client envisioned, allowing me to derive the app’s architecture and merge it with TTU’s existing marketing design.
In the early stages of understanding the intended architecture of the app, there were four main sections available globally once users were logged in. They pertained to the core experience and seemed to exist as bare essentials.
However, with some careful refactoring, it was possible to adjust the taxonomy of certain functions whilst taking advantage of the abundant screen real estate of the target device: the iPad Mini.
Some of the iconography and nomenclature changed as well to bring across a theme consistent with treasure-hunting and location-based games. The main action, for example, is a dynamic verb in the form of “Play” to appeal to user engagment, differentiating itself from the other more static options as nouns.
As a pure UI project, the app design was iterated upon a number of times with the client’s involvement to meet their vision of this new business channel. Although it would’ve been more ideal to incorporate user-centred design, this unusual method tested my knowledge of iOS interface design with a client-satisfying result.
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