Wizarding World Wand 🧙🏻♂️
A project I worked on as part of my Immersive Experience Design curriculum to research an interest-based community and create a guest experience.
Project Overview 📝
In my Audience Development and Engagement course, we were tasked with identifying an audience, researching that audience, and creating an experience specifically tailored to the motivations and intentions of the identified audience. My team chose to explore the theme park community.
The Problem 🤔
We sought to create a solution that expanded a park visitor's experience while also providing an avenue for user's to engage with when not physically in the parks. This would help overcome the geographical, financial, and time-oriented challenges as well as the implications of COVID-19 on park visitors.
Research Question:
How do we engage with the theme park audience outside of the physical park space?
My Role/Responsibilities 👨🏼💻
Role: Research and User Interaction Design Lead
I operated as the team lead for the project, coordinating a Trello board for task delegation and timeline management. I spearheaded our group's efforts for user research efforts employing the use of primary and secondary research through literature review, netnography, and discourse analysis.
I also coordinated and facilitated 10 user interviews with theme park fans and employees. I also managed the team's efforts to derive actionable insights from our audience research. Furthermore, I was responsible for developing user experience flows, wireframing, and prototyping a mobile application in Figma.
Audience Research 🧐
Research Methods:
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Literature review on transmedia storytelling and theme park interaction and engagement
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Netnography
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Observe and participate in Discord channels, Reddit threads, and Facebook groups
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Theme Park Influencer video and blog content
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Social Media Content
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10 User Interviews (Mix of theme park fans and employees)
Specifically from our user interviews, we sought to uncover the wants, needs, emotions, motivations and intentions of our audience. I transcribed our interviews utilizing Otter.ai and established coding guidelines to dissect our interviews.
Insights:
People visit theme parks to...
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Feel a sense of nostalgia
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Make new memories
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Enter a state of play
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Discover new worlds
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See worlds come to life
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Connect with a community
Audience Personas 👤
From our team's audience research, I crafted an audience value proposition map as well as 3 distinctive personas.
From our team's audience research, I crafted an audience value proposition map as well as 3 distinctive personas.
After our audience research, our team presented our findings and were given feedback. After capturing feedback, our group decided that our focus area of theme parks was very broad, and in order to truly craft an experience that resonated with our audience, we needed to dive into an individual intellectual property associated with theme parks. We collectively decided to craft an augmented reality (AR) experience associated with the Harry Potter IP.
We decided to focus on AR because our user research showed us that they had limited interest in virtual reality. Our research showed us that users wanted an experience that expanded their in-park experience and provided them utility to experience the fun of theme parks at home in some capacity.
Our concept was developed to give Universal’s existing Harry Potter wand additional utility within the parks themselves to expand exploration throughout the park, limit the burden of waiting in line, and provide an experience that can be enjoyed outside of the park itself.
Content bible covering audience research.
Final content bible covering our AR experience.
Team Credits
Katie Hoovestol - Lead Writer
Miu Nakata - Design Lead