Designing an app | Sign of Influence
Imaging a shopper walking past a digital sign that then starts to display items based on her preferences. This is called triggered content and can add an exciting dimension to commercial signs and kiosks.
Made popular by the visionary film Minority Report, individually targeted content delivered by public signs is no longer science fiction. Broadcasting personal preferences is not a far stretch from current excepted social media patterns. You would think nothing of sharing color or music preferences via Facebook, why not share with public signage. My point is that an established behavioral pattern already exists.
What’s in it for me? Social ecosystems must provide value in exchange for participation. The value proposition for SoI (Sign of Influence) is:
Novelty | It’s just cool to pass a sign in public and have it customized your experience. Appealing to the consumer’s ego.
Convenience | It’s easier to find products that you like when the offerings have been curated based on your preferences.
Efficiency | Retailers can guide you through a more efficient point of sale experience. For example online checkout.
I want to share with you just some of the challenges and rewards that I encountered while building this thing.
Design Lineage
The design evolved over time by way of many quick iterations and input from test users. While it is true that the interface has evolved the most significant changes were in the way the app was explained (on-boarding and micro-copy). The challenge was explaining the value proposition for what is really an abstract concept. The idea that through using a progressive app you can influence the content of publicly displayed signage is new and for some difficult to grasp. In retrospect it seemed like every iteration was more about educating the user of the potential of the app. I even renamed the app. The name Sign of Influence (SoI) was chosen because it helped elucidate the primary use case.
A quick comment on the technical challenges. I found it difficult to meet the needs of the curriculum using just a prototyping tool like inVision. Don’t get me wrong, I do like inVision but frankly I could have coded the front end in the time invested in prototyping. I finally devised a hack worth sharing. I downloaded the inVision prototype and the put in on GitHub pages. This allowed me to make some fundamental changes JS/CSS to the way that it was presented. The result was a prototypical app WITH the background signage.
