These wireframes are for my project, Explore Harvard. Explore Harvard is a QR-code-based interactive map that allows users to explore Harvard’s campus with relative ease. When conducting need-finding for this project, we found that tourists on Harvard’s campus were having difficulty accessing information about the landmarks on campus, and foreign tourists felt that there weren’t any resources for them at all.
After looking into the available resources for tourists, we found that there is information available on Harvard’s website, it just isn’t easily accessible or available in languages other than English. There are also free pamphlets at the university’s Smith Campus Center, but this location is not readily advertised as an information center.
Using this information, I created mock-ups of potential solutions for tourists and conducted more interviews with tourists around Harvard Yard. From these interviews, I found that tourists really enjoyed the idea of QR codes located at landmarks around campus that linked to webpages. One older man liked the fact that he didn’t have to download anything. A younger couple enjoyed the idea of going hunting for these QR codes around campus. They also liked the idea of having the language of the product match the language on the user’s phone, therefore minimizing effort on the user’s end to find information in their native language.
Explore Harvard uses a series of QR codes located at landmarks around campus to provide tourists with information. If a user scans a QR code at a landmark, they are directed to a website with information about that landmark (second picture, top left). The information on that webpage would be in the same language as the user’s default language on their phone. If they scan a QR code at a gate, they are directed to a page explaining what Explore Harvard is before they can access the interactive map (first picture, bottom path). Our map is also accessible from the Harvard website (first picture, top path) and includes both a general (second picture, top right) and specific (second picture, bottom left) search feature. As for navigation, a user can navigate to any landmark on campus using the navigation feature (second picture, bottom left. The navigation feature utilizes Google Maps, which would hopefully make if more intuitive for our users. It also includes a wheelchair accessible path option, as there are many paths around campus that aren’t wheelchair friendly.
The UI in this post is the result of three rounds of refining the original QR code idea into a usable product for tourists. Each round consisted of sketching out an idea, conducting user evaluation, and adjusting the UI according to problems identified as a result of the evaluation.
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