building community in Borough Market through interaction design
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Overview
This project was carried out as a semester-long assignment for my interaction design class during my master’s program. My project group was assigned the task of designing a creative and tailored interactive digital technology that would enhance the experience of visitors to either an open-air space or a museum of our choice. The technology we designed had to enable visitors to leave a digital “trace” in the space.
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My group decided to focus in Borough Market, a popular food market in central London with a rich history of bringing the community together through food. However, through observations and user interviews, we found that this sense of community wasn’t felt by visitors to the space.
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After conducting 6 user interviews and analyzing the data, we designed an interactive team game displayed on a kiosk that aimed to create an opportunity for fostering a stronger sense of social connection between people in an environment that was deemed by users as impersonal. Through team gameplay, users would be able to build relationships with one another in this transient environment.
PROJECT PROCESS & DETAILS
OBSERVATIONS & INTERVIEWS
We began our research by conducting observations in Borough Market over the course of 3 days, giving us an idea of what happened in the market during different times. We took photos and notes, either on our phones or notebooks, to document our observations.
From these observations, we gained a general idea of three main personas or user groups in the market that we later confirmed through our user interviews. These groups included tourists, locals, and food vendors.
We conducted user interviews in the market with these three user groups and kept interviews under 10 minutes to match the fast-paced environment of the market.
During our interviews, we discovered two main demographics that used the market in different ways: locals and tourists. These two groups did not interact with each other, resulting in neither group feeling a particular sense of attachment to the market. We saw an opportunity here to build up connections between these two groups as we synthesized our data.
DATA ANALYSIS
As a group, we aggregated the data from our user interviews and observations in the market, creating an empathy map to understand user perspectives and identify user pains and gains.
The Insight
Users felt a lack of opportunity to get to know people and build connections in the market.
The pains and gains defined in our empathy map gave us a starting point to create our user personas that would ultimately guide our design decisions. We finalized two personas with similarly aligned goals:
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Anna Travis; a London local
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Alexandra Wang; a tourist visiting London
Each persona had a desire to participate in the community and build authentic relationships around them.
USER JOURNEYS
Using the two personas we created, our user journeys through the market clarified what both our personas needed and how they might relate to each other. While the two groups did not interact much, they both played an integral part of the community. We explored how we might break down the barriers that existed between these two groups with our technology.
CONCEPTUAL DESIGN
​Through brainstorming activities like ‘worst possible idea’, rapid ideation, and brainwriting, our group was able to flesh out solid ideas for how we could garner community in Borough Market.
We ended up exploring three main concepts and iterated on each of these with sketches before we decided on our final concept:​
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Borough Buddy app with live chat, donations,and photo sharing
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Kiosk game with donation at the end
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Kiosk game with upload to photo board
This third iteration is what we ultimately decided to move forward with, as it focused on engaging users to leave a digital trace while building the Borough Market community through game play and photo contribution.
Sketches of possible designs to flush out ideas and identify any issues, along with sketches of the kiosk and display in the market to help visualize the physical design of the technology.
DETAILED DESIGN
After sketching our designs and determining the user flow of the on-screen interactions, low-fidelity prototypes were created in Figma. We returned to the market and tested these prototypes with 3 differents users.
The Insight
Clear and concise explanations were needed for users to understand the purpose of the game quickly.
To address this insight, the gameplay instructions were laid out on three separate pop-up screens that had a clear flow of how to move to the next screen. We utilized a Question & Answer approach with the delivery of game instructions to engage users to focus on each task in a conversational way.
As we designed the final kiosk layout, we wanted to encourage as much interaction between users as possible. We expanded user interactions by moving the game controllers away from a touchscreen, placing them instead as two separate red directional buttons that stood on vertical posts away from the kiosk. These two buttons were spaced at an appropriate distance to encourage the two users to operate their own directional button and better accommodate two people in the space.
Reflections
We weren’t afraid to iterate and improve our design ideas, even if that meant going back to the beginning and starting with a new concept. However, with that being said, we likely would have benefitted from doing more testing and iterating earlier on in our design process. We ended up building out two ideas nearly to completion before settling on our third and final design. More exploration of early designs might have saved us a lot of time we spent on these two designs. But we weren’t afraid to iterate!
Check out the prototype of the game below.
