Designing Momentos
Creating Post-Cards to share at UX Strat: Europe 2019
As part of Utah Valley University’s (UVU) Computer Science: Web App and Development program, I’ve been able to be apart of some amazing experiences. The program is full of professor’s that want their students to succeed which is shown by their drive to introduce us to as many opportunities apart from school as they can.
One such opportunity came when we were invited to attend and volunteer at the 2019 UX Strat: Europe conference held in Amsterdam in the early part of June. The programs first international UXpedition. What is a UXpedition you ask? It is a way to build and establish relationships with businesses and design teams that are in the UX field. These trips have helped students talk to professionals that can help prepare them for careers after they graduate.
Creating a Plan
While our group was excited for the opportunity to travel to Europe and experience a different culture, we also wanted to devise a plan to show our skills as students and present it to the UX Strat’s attendees — with the blessing of Paul Bryan, UX Strat creator/coordinator, of course. To accomplish this task we needed to make sure that our project wasn’t intrusive to the conference-goers but still showed a small part of our skills.
Between Cassidy Bouse, our UXpedition Student Lead, and myself, we decided the best route was to create a simple immersive postcard with these objectives in mind:
- give attendees something physical that they could remind them of the UX Strat: Europe conference
- highlight the skills that UVU students are developing
- offer them a way to connect with their American volunteers and learn more about our program.
Sketches and Design
The skills that we decided to implement in our project were VR/AR experiences. At this particular time, we were working with the program Zap Works, a software that helps their customers add custom AR experiences to apps or publications. With our goals in mind, we sketched a layout for our postcard.
Cassidy and I decided to create three different cards with elements of Amsterdam and the conference. We would create three “zap” codes in total. The first code would be a VR 360° tour of a site we visited as a group. The second would be a quote from one of the speakers from the conference, and the last would link a cardholder to our UVU Digital Media social media pages and the school website where they could learn more about the program.
Another reason we decided to build our content in Zap Works was that we had the ability to create zap codes and print them onto the postcards before we left for Amsterdam. It was important for us to create the content ourselves which meant taking all the photos, editing, and stitching them all in Amsterdam on our downtime.
Pivots, Late Nights, and Success
The images on the front of the postcard helped us coordinate our 360° panoramas and choose our destinations. Originally we wanted to take photos of windmills, canals, and a tulip field. Not realizing our poor timing, we had to pivot since tulips are only in season for a short period of time; even in Holland. But as pretty as the tulip fields would have been, we made a mutual decision to pivot to the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, where the UX Strat conference was being held (surprisingly this was our most sought after card).
We started this project with an idea and timeline in mind and believed everything would go smoothly. What we didn’t account for was that it was the first time in Europe for most of us and Amsterdam is beautifully distracting. Which meant late nights and designing with the group the night before we were to hand out our project. While Cassidy, Jade, Lauren, and I worked on the panorama design work, Ben and Kes created our AR experience featuring quotes from keynote speakers that were gathered before we took off from Salt Lake.
So, even though we may have procrastinated slightly, everything came out beautifully and was well received at the conference. It was a great way to talk to more people and tell them about UVU Digital Media’s program and all the support that we are given to help us succeed.
If you’re interested, here are some of the 360° Pano Tours completed as a group.
If you would like to learn more about Zap.Works feel free to visit their site at https://zap.works/
Would you like to see how our post-cards work? You can download the Zappar App on Android and iOS devices and scan the zap codes on the embedded images in this article.
Truly, many thanks go to the efforts of my fellow students: Cassidy Bouse, Jade Longhurst, Lauren Swainston, Keslee Amussen and Ben Perkins. Without the help and collaboration from all of us, this project would not have been a success. If you would like to learn more about our trip and elements from our journey I encourage you to read the articles that they have written about Utah Valley University’s UXpedition: Amsterdam 2019.
