Animal Experience Design for a Zoo(2/2)
Don’t miss part 1/2 before you read this.
Part I: Prototype
Half of our work was done, as I previously explained in Part1/2, so now we had enough hints to start our prototype. Yet, we didn’t want the focus to be just in one area, since we had so many ideas that we liked during the process of ideation. We planned a redistribution of the zoo’s space with some important changes:
- giving priority to the habitat of the native animals;
- creating glass corridors for users to see animals in big spaces;
- allowing the user to live new digital experiences with exotic animals;
- creating a virtual guide pet;
These changes would be the most important ones to keep working in the prototype and test. But how to put them together?
We did storyboard as part of the presentation of our new proposal, reproducing the experience of a mother with her child going to the zoo, where she and her child try the new experiences of the zoo.
We decided to design a new web for Barcelona’s Zoo because we thought we could present all our ideas in few pages and see user’s reactions. The actual web of the zoo is pretty useful and easy but not as good as it could be. We wanted to improve the look & feel and make it easier to understand the new changes and zoo’s new philosophy. We prepared a general Moodboard putting together all the influences we could apply to the new web. We considered that the color green expressed better our idea of moving back to natural .
We edited some videos searching in the web for good footages of animals and people in the zoo, adds and other material that could be edited for the prototype. So we prepared an introducing video for the home.
Also, we put in order the Information’s Architecture to show the content’s hierarchy.
Meanwhile we generated wireframes and prepared the Work Flow to decide how to organize the interaction. We also generated an User Flow of a costumer during his visit at the zoo.
So, when the structure was ready, we started to design the new web. We had inspirations but at the same time we had also very different ideas and perspectives between us in the group. Anyway, we didn’t have much time to doubt about our next steps so we just started to design it.
The new web showed the new concept, immersive reality experiences animal simulations and the comeback of Little Snowflake as a virtual guide that would take users through the experience in the zoo. We had to test it to see if people could really understand all this new information in just few screens, but we were pretty proud of our new proposal.
Pt II: Test
During the last day, we looked for people to test our new web prototype. Basically, we went to bar and open spaces and asked to people if they could spend twenty minutes with our web. We arranged some tests and we collected all the thoughts and behaviours of potential users.
But we started to find a lot of problems in our web while testing:
- navigation wasn’t easy, most of the people didn’t understand the horizontal scroll;
- nobody really did it to the last page of the home, so none ever knew and commented about or idea of creating the virtual Little Snowflake guide in the zoo;
- almost nobody red the informations in the web, showing once more that people dislike to read texts;
- nobody understood deeply the new zoo’s concept.
It was pretty clear that we had to change deeply the web in a more visual proposal, yet defending what was the main center of our project: the new concept of a zoo centred in the animal experience. Probably we also had to concentrate to the prototype of just one moment of the whole experience, more than a general web, but we wanted to try to present all the idea to receive a feedback from users. The fact that we couldn’t really get that exact feedback was frustrating. People seemed to like it and everybody would visit this new zoo, but they didn’t even understand what was exactly our new zoo.
Anyway it was way a pleasure for us to put in practice all the Design Thinking techniques with such a controversial, contemporary and important argument. I personally hope Barcelona’s Zoo will turn into a place where people can go and see safe and happy animals and have a more educative experience about animals’ and nature’s world.
Many thanks to my great work team: Marina Martínez García, Zoraida Moreno Cadenas, Adrián Padilla.
