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LOST AT THE ZOO

Emerging Media Capstone

Nothing brings back childhood memories like a trip to the zoo. Watching otters gliding through the water, seeing a giant elephant for the first time, seeing penguins waddle — there’s something extraordinary about seeing animals through the eyes of a child. These are the kind of memories to reflect back on with your parents, grandparents, and your own children.

The world becomes a better place when children care about all livings things. Animals teach children valuable lessons, about empathy, conservation, the environment, the circle of life — lessons that follow children into adulthood. Lost at the Zoo is an educational app that fosters this kind of love.

Lost at the Zoo is the official mobile augmented reality app of Zoo Atlanta. It creates a more memorable zoo experience for both children and parents.

Zoo Atlanta has several unique selling points. Primarily, it’s only one of four zoos in the entire country to have giant pandas, some of the most beloved creatures on Earth. Zoo Atlanta has earned it’s place as an iconic feature in the city. The zoo draws in visitors from all over Georgia, the United States, and beyond.

Many families take their children to the zoo. And while their children may have a blast at the zoo, it’s a different story for parents. Approximately 37 percent of parents find the trip stressful, long, and exhausting.

Lost at the Zoo solves this problem by making the inaugural trip to the zoo easier for busy families. While the target audience is parents, Lost at the Zoo can enhance the zoo experience for anyone.

The second purpose of Lost at the Zoo is to carry out the zoo’s mission statement:

This is accomplished through the educational, augmented reality experience. This experience is designed especially for those with growing hands and growing minds, children 6 years old and up.

The AZA’s research also shows mothers are primary visitors. For these moms, juggling multiple children at the zoo is difficult. Moms want to keep to their children entertained — and keep children’s minds occupied, too. Lost at the Zoo is way for children to engage with animals on a deeper level. It offers entertainment between exhibits on the zoo path without distracting from physical experience.

A better future for all living beings starts with a child.

For children, Lost at the Zoo is a way to get up close and personal with slow sloths, spooky owls and majestic tigers. By using a story to kickstart the game, children engage with animals in a way never seen before at the zoo. There’s more to Lost at the Zoo than discovering wild creatures roaming the zoo. Educational components keep parents satisfied.

For parents, Lost at the Zoo is a way to make the trip to the zoo more convenient. A GPS-enabled map keeps parents from missing a single animal. Explore today’s schedule of events and find everything you could want to know about animals, from African lions to zebras. Everything you need to enjoy your zoo experience is one app.

The Lost at the Zoo Game

Zoo Atlanta needs your help. Pesky pandas have let animals escape their enclosures. Now, they’re roaming around the zoo. Team up with Amanda the panda and use your smartphone’s camera to find lost animals with this AR application. Earn their trust by learning more about them.

GPS-Enabled Map

Say goodbye to paper maps and say hello to a more sustainable future. Lost at the Zoo comes equipped with a GPS-enabled map to make sure you’re never lost again. Want to head straight to the pandas? Lost at the Zoo will show you the way.

Schedule

Today’s schedule of events is one less piece of paper to hold on to while you’re enjoying feeding giraffes. From Art Gone Wild Week to the Wonders of Widlife, plan out your visit to a T.

Animal Info

Children have questions. Lost at the Zoo has answers. Learn everything there is to know about Zoo Atlanta’s animals and where to find them at the zoo with this feature.

Dining

Moms like to be prepared. Planning for meals with picky eaters just became easier. This feature shows all dining and beverage stations at the zoo.

Wild Lenses

Don’t bother opening up a third-party app. All you need to share your zoo experience is in one spot. Use AR lenses to capture all the silly and breathtaking moments you’ll encounter. Create memories and cherish them forever.

Tickets

Skip the line and purchase your ticket from the comfort of your home, your favorite coffee shop or wherever you prefer.

There’s More to Come

Lost the Zoo has the potential to inspire generations to come to care about conservation and animals. It has the potential to entertain, educate and enhance the zoo experience. This could awaken lifelong love for animals and biology in children.

On a personal level, Lost at the Zoo offers a convenient and easy way to manage trips to the zoo. By having a map, schedule, dining, and camera all in once place, parents can easily plan out trips and stay organized. It has the impact to make life just a little bit easier.

On a local level, schools, camps and clubs in the Atlanta area can participate in greater educational initiatives by visiting the zoo and using the app. This has the potential to inspire and educate.

During the design process, branding was kept as consistent to Zoo Atlanta’s branding as possible. This ensured brand recognition and credibility.

The process began with pen and paper mockups, lists and ideas. After mockups came original illustrations in Adobe Illustrator. These illustrations included Amanda (originally Lun Lun) and her stylish zookeeper aviators and hat; all the answer options, the animal outlines, and the logo. After illustrations came the screen designs. The first round were created in Illustrator, than Photoshop, and finally Indesign. Indesign proved the simplest way to create app templates.

Illustrator was best for creating vector images, Photoshop was best for touching up these vectors, and Indesign was best for putting everything together into one cohesive screen.

Marvel also allows for instant mockups in the “Play” feature, allowing users to easily test the app. Other specific features used in Marvel included screen overlay (although sadly this can only be used once on the free version), free-to-use design elements like iPhone icons and buttons, and transitions to help guide the user experience between screens.

While Marvel certainly has limitations, it’s one of the fastest and most efficient programs for crafting a minimum viable product, a key component in agile development.

The Future is AR

In the finished product, augmented reality and animation will be used extensively. Augmented reality superimposes computer-generated graphics and information on a real-world environment; using the phone’s camera to see things that aren’t actually there. With the new iPhone X just announced, and Apple’s ARKit earlier this year, it’s clear to see AR is the future. Companies like Google, Apple and Facebook are all developing AR applications.

An AR prototype tool would be ideal for creating an app like Lost at the Zoo. Unfortunately, technology isn’t the. WiARframe and other tools were tested, but unfortunately these tools are still in the beta stage.

Unlike many competing zoos and aquariums nearby, Zoo Atlanta does not have a app. Instead of filling this hole with a mobile-version of the website, Lost at the Zoo goes above and beyond to support the Zoo’s mission. Lost at the Zoo creates a dynamic story with children as the protagonist. It engages with children in a unique and powerful way, setting Zoo Atlanta miles apart from it’s competitors. This app is more than “just an app” for Zoo Atlanta.

Literature Review

Designing apps for children is not monkey business. Key insights from existing literature was used in designing Lost at the Zoo. Below are takeaways from two major articles that helped the design process. Successful apps for children were downloaded to better understand UI decisions for children’s apps.

Design and Development Lessons

Simplicity is key. If an app is beautifully designed, but too complicated to use, it will not be successful. That being said, don’t underestimate your target audience. Users, no matter their age, are often smarter than designers think. Children especially are gifted in being able to repeat something they read once. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Design is a careful, precarious balance between the two: keeping it simple and easy to use for everyone, but not dumbing it down and insulting the intelligence of users.

Staying up to date with current trends in UX and UI is important. Trends like gradients and AR played a major role in design for Lost at the Zoo. Flat design — traditionally not used for children — was incorporated in areas where it was appropriate.

Iterations are the bread and butter of designing an app. From the concept creation on pen and paper, to the design process, to stitching the user’s journey across a prototyping tool — everything was iterated, and iterated, and iterated. Even the logo, the website, the trailer, the style guide, everything was in a constant state of flux and growth. Iterations are like user testing: you can never have too many.

The style guide helped to create all materials consistent, from the website to the postcards. It was, as the name suggests, a guide for all brand decisions.

The greatest challenge with a style guide is sticking to it. As mentioned previously, the style guide was iterated several times when the creator learned new information and discovered better typographic choices. As you design more for a brand, you discover better ways of doing things, which means the style guide required constant upkeep.

A cognitive walkthrough study using the think-aloud protocol was conducted. Subjects also participated in in-depth interviews. Sampling focused on the target market, primarily parents and their children between the ages of 6 and 11.

This testing provided major insights. For example, the 11-year-old, thought this was app was too easy. One of the six-year-olds who’s first language was not English didn’t understand the story, although another six year old grasped the concepts well. This helped to narrow down the target age range to seven years to eight years old category (Apple has set categories for children’s apps), although it could appeal to any child six years old and up.

A key takeaway from user testing didn’t pertain so much to the design or user journey, but the wording of the testing. What the creator viewed as funny or obvious, many users didn’t understand. For example, when the panda says, “WAIT A MINUTE,” a mom literally thought she was supposed to wait a minute. With anything story-driven, wording must be carefully crafted and tested on a diverse range of individuals.

A few reccomendations from users included the following:

The competitive advantage report shed light on the marketplace. It revealed there were no real competitors for Zoo Atlanta. On a larger scale, the report showed that mobile ARGS for children, let alone ones featuring educational components, have yet to be established.

While augmented reality games have been around a while, they have yet to come close to saturating the market. ARG is estimated to become the next big trend in mobile development. The market for ARGs for children is few and far between, let alone the market for educational ARGs for children. Likewise, in the zoo category, only one app targeting Zoo Atlanta exists on the market. There is room for major growth.

The business model canvas helped to define revenue channels for Lost at the Zoo. It was clear how the app would provide value, but it wasn’t as clear how it could bring value back to the zoo. This planning tool initated brainstorming sessions that ultimately resulted in the following revenue channels:

If I could offer one nugget of wisdom to future cohorts, it would be: go down the rabbit hole. Find something you love, and don’t be afraid to bring it up, even if you don’t know much about it!

I mentioned to a professor I thought drones were cool. Little did I know a few months later I would be planning a Drone Summit. Likewise, I took a class outside the required courses on a whim, and it turned out to be one of my favorite courses. I ended up writing an academic research paper on my favorite memes of all time, the Bee Movie memes.

Find something you love, and go down the rabbit hole.

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