Finding your Way — Billboard Video Design Project
“I just want to get on the boat tour on the Singapore River.”
The sweet old American lady is telling us this in Bugis in Singapore. We are in an air-conditioned room, but there is sweat beading her forehead and soaking through her clothes. She’s holding a smudged notebook, but it’s not very helpful.
She wants to get to the Singapore River cruise, but she’s now in Bugis. And she doesn’t know how to get there without suffering the intense afternoon heat outside.
So how can we help people like her? More appropriately, how do we help them in a way that makes sense to them?
Our client in this case, Billboard Video, specialises in large LED displays. In their native Kazakhstan, these banners are placed along highways and aimed at drivers going past.
But for their product in Singapore, BBV wanted something it had never tried before — an interactive product to be placed outdoors in areas of Singapore with high foot traffic, oriented towards locals and foreigners walking about in the city.
Our goal was to design the interactive portion of this display — to determine what information it should contain, and how it should present that information to its users.
So here’s where we started. We visited six tourist attractions and talked to tourists and service staff. Sometimes we had to help provide directions too. But in general, we gathered a few important insights.
The Problems that Visitors Face
The Heat
“Do you know where I can get an ice cream?”
It may seem really obvious to us living in Singapore, but the heat and humidity really takes a lot out of foreign visitors. Even without asking questions, it’s easy to observe them seeking the shade, or looking for air-conditioned places.
The implications are clear — visitors don’t want to stay out in the sun, staring at a screen for ages to figure out where they are. Our design needs to be quickly informative, or people won’t use it at all.
The Distances
“Which way is Sentosa from here?”
This was a question that a visitor centre staff got all the time from visitors coming into the office. There’s just one catch: she’s working at Gardens by the Bay, which is… not near Sentosa at all.
Is Chinatown near Little India? Is Orchard far from Lau Pa Sat? The fact is, many visitors really don’t know. Their mental map of Singapore can be patchy: maybe a list of areas (Bugis, Clarke Quay), maybe a list of attractions (Sentosa, Gardens by the Bay).
And people get lost, like that sweet old lady in the start of the article, when they try to get from one spot to another.
This has real implications for how we present information to people: we will need a design that presents Singapore’s attractions in tiers, yet allows for the freedom of choice. If users just want to know what’s nearby, they should see it at a glance.
But if they want to go somewhere — never mind how far it is — then they should find it quickly too.
Not just Attractions
“Where’s the toilet?”
Users don’t just go to attractions. In fact, many of their needs are more mundane: toilets, ice cream, bus stops and taxi stands. Sometimes they need this in isolation; sometimes it is part of a process (to go to Sentosa, I have to get a cab).
These things can be too numerous to present in a fixed map, but we aren’t doing a fixed map — so here’s where we can provide some real value.
Our Design
Contextual Banners
Firstly, making use of the height of the displays, we designed banners to be visible from a distance. These banners guide users to what is useful right now: umbrellas in rainy days, ice cream for hot afternoons, and notifications about train timings for late nights.
One-Click Nearby Navigation
A majority of visitors to Singapore think of it as a group of areas. They go to a place, and want to know what’s around the area. That’s why our home screen has exactly that — with instructions available with just one click, for nearby attractions as well as amenities.
And if they want to head somewhere else that’s not on the screen? A quick search gives them instructions to any attraction in Singapore.
Instructions, Your Way
The potential of an interactive map is that it doesn’t need to be just a map. In fact, our observation showed that people much prefer signage to maps, because the signage is a single, easily understood instruction in an arrow.
To start with, we tried two methods of navigation: the good old traditional map, and also a street view so people can see where they ought to be facing. We wanted to test out which layout, and which combination of methods, would work best.
Putting it to the Test
Now that we had our design ready, we had to take it to the most important people — the ones who are actually using it.
And so, over four days, we took a iPad with the design and talked to more than twenty foreign visitors, asking them to complete any two of the following three tasks:
- Find a nearby attraction within walking distance;
- Find a more distant attraction that requires public transport;
- Find the nearby toilet.
Simple tasks, of course — but even with our research-backed design, the first version still lost some of our users. But their feedback provided insights for us to adjust the design, bring it out the next day and try again.
By day 4, all the users we asked could understand and succeed in their tasks. Average time to get something done was just a few seconds, and on a scale of 1 (difficult) to 7 (easy), our average score for ease of use was around 6.
And that’s how we know we can help people find their way.
This project is just one of several that Reassemble has done in 2018. Maybe, for 2019, we can work to improve your product too.
If that sounds good to you, come check out our website, or drop us a line on Facebook or LinkedIn.
