Miami University

Ideation

I was lucky enough to be working at an agency that specialized in Augmented and Virtual Reality. With the teams’ skillset in mind, we began thinking of ways to make the most of it! Which technology made the most sense for the users needs?

We brainstormed until we came up with two core ideas to execute:

1. 360° tours of the most popular locations on campus 

2. A quiz to help students learn fun facts about the school

Expanding our Ideas

Now that we had our core ideas, we needed to figure out how to tie them together and turn it into a fun user experience for the students using the top four questions we had at the start of the project. 

What are the most important places on campus a student would like to see? 

We asked the university what areas of the campus students frequently visited. They provided five locations: The courtyard, the dorm rooms, the ‘cave’ (which was their emerging technology demonstration room), the hockey arena, and the student center. 

How can we enhance the experience to show more than just photos? 

What’s better than a flat photo gallery? 360° interactive photos. We knew that we could showcase 360° photos of each room and call it a day, but we wanted more than that. We wanted students to truly feel like they were spending a day on campus, so we decided to add in high-speed videos filmed from a person’s point of view, walking from location to location. By doing this, students would get an even clearer vision of what it would be like to walk the campus of Miami University, all while sitting at home. 

How do we keep high school students engaged?

We know that attention spans are shorter than ever these days and introducing fun, easy to use, interactive elements are a must. We didn’t just want students to see the university, we wanted them to learn about it too. We decided to gamify the whole experience (thinking back to our user, Lucas), adding in quiz questions, custom avatars, fun school memorabilia for your avatar, and an honour roll, aka a high score chart to create some friendly competition. Our hypothesis was that students would share their high scores with their friends and entice them to also try it out, leading to more engagement, and ultimately more interest in the school.

I decided to further gamify the experience by making the quiz questions elements that you had to search for within the 360° experience. Moving your camera view around until you found and answered all five questions. I was responsible for researching the university and writing questions based on fun facts of the school. I layered in the quiz questions with elements that could be used to add to the users avatar.

User Flow

So how did we tie it all together and make the magic happen? Here is the user flow I created:

Low-Fidelity Wireframing

Using the user flow, I created sketches to get a clearer picture of what the final product would look like. We presented the sketches to the stakeholders for review and then proceeded with high-fidelity mockups. Throughout the whole process I actively collaborated with my team, ensuring that every step was both technically feasible, within scope, and on target to reach our users goals.

Putting it all Together

With my wireframes approved by the stakeholders, I proceeded to the high-fidelity mockups. I was responsible for the entire UI, the character creation, prototyping, and exporting assets for the developers.

In the end there were 61,740 variations that could be made with the avatar elements given (such as hair style, hair colour, skin tone, etc), 30 quiz questions to learn facts about the school, a thorough look at the campus through the combination of video and 360° photography, and an element of competition. When we refer back to my third question at the start (What can we do to stand out from other universities?), I’d say we created a pretty unique experience. We enabled students to go on a journey through campus from home - something that no other university was offering!

 *This project was still in development when I left the agency, therefore I didn’t get to see how well it performed, if we succeeded in increasing engagement for out-of-state students, or ultimately increasing the number of applicants to Miami University.

What would I have done next?

It has been a few years since this project was created, so what would I do if I were working on it now?

I would love to see the metrics on how the whole experience performed.

Quantitative

• How many users completed the flow on desktop vs mobile?

• How many users completed the entire flow?

• How many users dropped off and where?

• How many users created accounts?

Qualitative

• What did users think of the experience?

• Did it help them to make a decision to attend Miami?

• What could we have done differently?

• Did users find everything they needed?

• What did they think of the personalized avatars?

• Did the 360 tours + videos provide enough context to help their decision?

• Were the quiz questions too easy or too hard?

All of this data would provide exceptional feedback on how the project was going and point out any gaps that we need to focus on, and help us to make informed decisions going forward.