Hidden NYC Mobile App

Hidden NYC is a mobile web application that uses geolocation to reveal hidden secrets about New York City as the user walks through it.

How It Works
The app works like a scavenger hunt. A user is given a location and once they physically go to that location, a secret is revealed to them. 

Inspiration
I got the idea for an iOS application after a visit by my father. He told me about a famous church that played a great part in the abolitionist movement in the 1850s that happens to be a mere 2 blocks from my apartment. Strangely, after three years of living in the neighborhood, I had only just stumbled across this fascinating piece of history, which led me to wonder what other landmarks I’m missing every day. 

Locations
I was most interested in highlighting details from New York’s unique history. I really like the idea that so many different experiences and events have occurred throughout the city’s life. My goal was to focus on the hidden history of the city with places like Collect Pont, that once served as the city’s main water source, but was eventually filled in, and the Central Park Night Club, an exclusive nightclub in the middle of the park that was established in the 1920s. 

Process
I first examined a number of similar applications including Field Trip and Urban Walks. These are interesting applications that provide a lot of interesting information about the city, but do it in a very different way. Field Trip sends notifications to the user when they are near a specific location, however the app has so many varied featured locations that it can seem a bit overwhelming. Urban Walks has artfully designed maps that provide the user with a set tour of historical locations throughout the city. I like the way that Field Trip sends the user locations that are near to them, and appreciate the historical subject matter of Urban Walks. 

I initially created a user journey and low-fidelity wireframes of the application. Then, I made a series of paper prototypes and user tested them with my studio. This allowed me to see how people used the app and helped me outline the user’s experience with the product.

Then I designed the user interface of the application, incorporating the city’s skyline into the design. Afterwards, I developed a mobile web application that reads the geographic coordinates of the user’s device and feeds them a nearby location. This allowed me to actually user test the app in the field.

After some testing, I found that the UI of the phone’s browser tended to get in the way of the web app, so I looked into making a native app and opted to use Cordova’s framework to move the web app that I had developed in HTML, CSS and Javascript into an Xcode project in Objective-C.

User Testing
User testing revealed a number of flaws with the preliminary design. For example, I had initially intended the app to interrupt the user’s daily experiences. However, in practice, users often missed the notifications from the app and didn’t end up seeing them until later on, when they were far from the specified location. Interrupting users in their daily routines also resulted in people visiting the same places again and again. Over time, the user will exhaust all of the app’s locations that are on their daily route and this would lead to users to quickly lose interest in the app instead of continuing to explore outside of the places that they regularly visit.

To solve these problems, I decided to structure the app like a scavenger hunt. Instead of having the app send the user notifications along their daily route, the user would elect to play. After opening the app, the user is shown a map with a nearby location. Once the user moves to that location and the app detects them there, a notification will appear with a startling fact about the place. The user will then have the option to “explore” which will allow them to see text and images highlighting the history of that location.