In 2015, I researched UX Best practices for geolocative content
in an educational context. Through this research, I designed an application
that delivers locationally relevant educational content to a user walking
through Toronto's historic Regent Park neighbourhood, while developing a body
of best practices for future educational applications.
Skip ahead to Best Practices
In the application I built with developer Stefan New, timed, regular
queries are sent to the server on which our data is stored. These queries
include the user's present geolocation and check for matches within a range
of a few metres of the uploaded data.
If the queries return true; that there is uploaded data tagged at a point near
the user's current position, the media downloads and the user is notified.
The majority of examples for this technology have focused on marketing and
advertising applications. In choosing to research educational potential, new
use cases would need to be developed.
While marketing communications assume some level of user interruption and
undesirability, educational resources have an audience who has already opted in.
As a result, while marketing messages are brief as a best practice, educational
content has the opportunity (and perhaps necessity) to run longer. User testing
was conducted to determine optimal length and format for content.
What type of educational experience that would be most appropriate for the
application? Determining from the use case whether the experience would be
passive or active guided UI and Content decisions early on, but was a recursive
process, as the ways in which content and UX are intertwined became evident.
Given the sensitive nature of the selected subject matter the curation of
content and development of an educational narrative was conducted within a
critical pedagogical paradigm, meaning that specific attention was given to the
effect that existing narratives have played on the neighbourhood, while
questioning the power dynamic of those narratives in articulating a desired
outcome.
The Regent Park neighbourhood was Canada's first and to this day largest
social housing development. For nearly 80 years, it has been the face of
changing attitudes and policies towards social housing and community
building, and thus, its visual history provides a stratified, detailed
review of these policies. It is also a vibrant neighbourhood with human
stories spanning generations.
The City of Toronto is currently redeveloping Regent Park to reflect modern
theories on urban planning and social housing that favour mixed use and mixed
income communities. For better or worse, the physical landscape of Regent Park
is being permanently changed on a scale not seen since the tower boom of the
1960s and 70s. Likewise, the demographic make-up of the neighbourhood will
change. Preserving the visual and lived history of an important Toronto
neighbourhood will be an important project, which is why it was selected to act
as the prototype geographic area in which this research is to be conducted.
Other practical benefits for the neighbourhood are its geographic qualities and
distinct primary narrative.
Bordered by Gerrard and Shuter Streets to the north and south respectively, and
Parliament and River Streets to the West and East, respectively, Regent Park is
a clearly defined area in which to bind the test area.
While Regent Park is a neighbourhood comprising many stories, its history as
Canada's largest public housing development is uniquely important to the area
and the lives of its residents. As such, it was straightforward to present a
singular narrative, with the caveat, learned through my interactions with the
neighbourhood, that said narrative would not claim to be authoritative,
complete, or in any way speaking for the neighbourhood's residents.
Read about Community Involvement in Narrative Development.
Recognizing my own lack of experience in the neighbourhood, I needed to
augment my project with insights from the community to ensure sensitivity and
to not repeat past mistakes.
Due to the limited scope of the project, I chose not to conduct interviews with
residents and instead approached community organizations in the neighbourhood to
consult with and use their professional insights from working in the community.
Of the organizations I approached, Dixon Hall was the most receptive and its
executive leadership was helpful in guiding my research to establish the
pertinent themes my curated content would focus on.
As experts in the neighbourhood and the issues facing it, the Dixon Hall team
advised on the history of the park, and after a series of iterative
consultations with them, I finalized the main themes to focus on: Police, Public
Health, Community Activism, Design, and Stigma.
My research yielded 30 data modules, each consisting of an archival image,
a short description and a geotag. The development of these modules was a
recursive process that was informed by User Experience design and testing.
Initially, the presentation of modules was unorganized. Users would follow
the map towards datapoints and receive that point's content.
This method decontextualized the information, rendering it less useful in an
educational capacity. For example, A user would access information related to a
historical event from the 1970's that referenced issues grounded in events of
the 1950's, covered in modules not yet accessed.
It became apparent it would be necessary to categorize the content. Two main
options were thematic organization and chronologic organization.
Read about Thematic vs. Chronological Organization.
Organizing the information thematically would be done with the themes
agreed upon with community partners at Dixon Hall (see "Community
Involvement"): Police, Public Health, Community Activism, Design and
Stigma.
This still posed the same initial problem, though, as in order to
contextualize the individual modules within these categories, some
chronology would be necessary. A possible solution was to 'unlock' modules
linearly, progressing through established themes.
For example, a user would initially be able to access the first module for
each category, then move through each category module by module, independent
of the other categories (See diagram below).
A major problem with this solution was that a user could progress through the history of Policing, or any other theme, without having any exposure to the other themes' modules to add context.
Chronological organization, on the other hand, categorizes content by
date. Within those categories, individual modules (covering a variety of
themes) are unlockable in any order. Due to the intersectionality of many
themes, this option was chosen. I wanted the user to be informed by all
chronologically previous modules, even those of different themes, when
reading new content.
When first using the application, the user is presented with the initial
category, "Before the Park". This section covers the decades leading up to
the creation of Regent Park, and explains many of the conditions that
predicated action by the city.
While this section contains modules that cover a number of themes, as do
subsequent categories, I felt it was important for users to know about the
history of Public Housing and Design, for example, contained in this
category, before reading about, again for example, the Police in subsequent
categories, as the development of future events are informed and predicated
upon events from all themes in the past.
Categorization also solved a separate issue encountered at the outset of
this project; with so much history having taken place within the 69 acres of
Regent Park, the geofencing boundaries we established would overlap many
times over. Without some form of progression or categorization, a user's
device would never cease receiving content and notifying the user.
This segmentation allows for a controllable experience, that manages
progression and notifications to ensure the best user experience.
User testing was conducted on three occasions using role play. I walked around Regent Park with my developer, Stefan New, and we took turns alternating acting as a user, with the other acting as the controller, who monitored position relative to a map and delivered content when the user approached the geolocation of a module.
Read about how this project connects to Video Games
Midway through the development of this project, I realized a similarity
between the work we were doing and a common storytelling mechanic in open
world video games.
Many open world games establish backstory through the collection of artifacts
like journals or newspapers hidden around the game world.
One of the earliest uses of this mechanic was in one of the first open world
games, 1993's Myst. Players would need to explore their surroundings to discover
books that established backstory and allowed the player to solve puzzles.
Other notable examples of this mechanic are videotapes found in Bioshock,
newspapers found in LA Noire, and journals and artifacts found in the most
recent Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. In these examples, when the protagonist collects
these items, a cutscene or voiceover is triggered that exposits backstory on a
variety of characters in the game.
There is some criticism of this mechanic in the academic video game community,
which highlights other forms of exposition (such as creative uses of
environmental design and player action) as more elegant ways to establish
backstory.
The function of this mechanic is to establish the player/protagonist's sense of
place and context within the world they are moving through. I found it
interesting to note the similarity in function and means to my own project,
where a user moves through Regent Park, unlocking what could be thought of as
"artifacts" that adds to her context and sense of place in the neighbourhood.
The comparison affected the user experience design by allowing me to use
language to motivate the user towards active use (See "Best Practices").
It's an insight that will also guide aspects of its marketing. Understanding that
there is a game-like element to the experience led me to present it as an
"engaging challenge," as opposed to an "opportunity to learn."
An API was created pointing towards a Mongo Database on which all curated content was referenced. The application was built using the Android Developer Studio Major milestones with the development were the creation of Geofencing, Persistence, and Establishing Database Connection.
Geofencing
A major part of the development of the application was the creation of
geofences around modules' set geolocation. Since users' devices vary in
accuracy, it is prudent to set geomarkers to trigger when the user enters a
zone rather than at a specific point. The boundaries of these zones are called
geofences.
Persistence
Persistence refers to the ability of a program to save a user's progress and
settings. In this case, the user's found modules needed to be accessible on
subsequent loads.
Establishing Database Connection
Because we used a free database server to host our API, connection time became
an issue. With free databases like Mongo, I found, idle servers power down to
save energy. When accessed by an application, these servers need time to
"spin up" before a connection can be made.
To improve user experience, We implemented a splash screen while the
application connects to the server.
These are a few major best practices this project yielded.
