CDM Virtual Tour
UX Research, Figma, Experience Design, Web Design
While working with PUSH Studios I got the chance to work with my university, DePaul and The Jarvis School of Computing and Digital Media to create a tour experience for prospective students. The Covid-19 pandemic showed how limiting in person visits can be for prospective students who are unable to travel due to the pandemic or economic hardships. Therefore we wanted to create an interactive online tour that could be launched on demand
Problem Statement
How might we create an engaging and informative tour experience for prospective students that is not limited by in-person visitation.
Research
Competitive reaserch
We first began our research by looking into what other universities were doing in terms of online tours. This gave us a better understanding of how other universities felt it was best to present their campuses online as well as what information they felt was important to include in the online tour.
Observations & Empathy Building
Another part of early research for our team was signing up for and attending an in-person tour to get a better understanding of what users experience while on these in-person tours. This allowed us to build empathy with our user as well as begin thinking about how the elements of the in-person tour could be translated into an online version.
Interviews
The final part of our research was conducting user interviews. My teammate and I identified two groups to do user interviews with being new students and current DePaul tour guides. We spoke with current DePaul freshmen to ask them about their recent college decision journey and how tours impacted that decision. We also learned about what they found to be most important and necessary in a tour. We also spoke with current tour guides. Through speaking with the tour guides we got a better understanding of what parts of the tour are students more interested in as well as what types of questions students often had during the tour experience.
Findings & Insights
After performing our user interviews we analyzed the data we had collected and developed it into our insights. We learned that a successful tour will be:
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Personalized
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Guided
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Organized
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Informational
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Entertaining
Early Prototype
To begin understanding the layout and general functionality of the tour our team put together prototype screens. We created the home screen as well as screens to test how information could be delivered such as through an avatar explaining the tour or via star shaped pop-ups throughout the tour.
Current Form
After conducting research and various user tests the our team created the first version of the 3D virtual tour. It was important to users that they are able to personalize the tour. With this in mind we decided to divide the tour according to the three school within JCDM. This allows users to view the parts of JCDM that are important and relevant to them. As a way to keep the tour fun and informative a voice over provides information as the user navigates through the tour and pop-ups will appear throughout the tour to provide fun facts via text and video pop-ups. Finally, for navigation users can use arrows on the floor to navigate through the floor they are on and a sidebar menu to travel between the floors.
“ I think it’d be helpful to have seen this before I came to DePaul to help me not feel as lost before attending”
For the Future
As stated previously the current version of the tour is the first version. As the Covid-19 pandemic persists and economic hardships continue to prevent students from being able to tour DePaul’s JCDM, they wanted to launch the virtual tour as soon as possible. However, PUSH did not want to create a tour experience that was lacking in any way. Our team began by discussing everything that could exist within this virtual tour and then took into consideration our timeline and discussed what was possible within our time frame. By doing this we ensured that we created a successful tour experience while also allowing DePaul to launch as soon as possible. Our team's goal is that once the first version has launched, we can go back and consider how the tour can be improved beyond the original to create a second version in the future.
Conclusion & Reflection
For this project I got experience working on a team with people from multiple disciplines such as game design and video/audio production. This allowed us each to bring our unique experience to this project as well be able to play to our strengths for the different portions of the project. Overall, this project gave me experience working for a client and understanding how to balance both the users and stakeholders needs.