Concept
Research
Interactions
Visuals
April - May 2022
Arcadia is a regional chain located in the Midwest, USA. Arcadia strives to deliver a fun, modern family experience with food and arcade games. The mobile app will help reflect this idea by providing users with the options to reload their arcade card, order food and book events right from their phone.
Create an easy task flow for the user
Offer pre planning and pre purchase options
Allow users control over their personal information
There are several arcade style venues for users to visit, however upon doing a competitive audit, I found that Chuck E Cheese, Dave & Busters and Main Event were the main competitors for Arcadia. While many of the app features did overlap, I found that none of them will let you reserve a table without booking an event and while Chuck E Cheese will let you book children's birthday parties. Also, none of them will let you order food directly to your table through the app.
Age: 37
Occupation: IT
Brian is an IT specialist at a large company who spends much of their time at home, working remotely. While off work, his time is spent with his kids at home or take them out for activities. Brian finds that at most of these activities or events, he spends a lot of time in line for things. He would like a venue to go to where he could mostly focus on time with his kids and less waiting for things.
Age: 20
Occupation: Full-Time Student
As a full-time student, Jeff loves to find new and interesting things to do when he's not studying. Jeff finds that where they go to school that most events and restaurants are very busy and hard to get a reservation or to even get the staffs attention. Jeff would like to find a venue that where he could "skip the line" with easy to make reservations.
I already had a pretty solid idea of how I wanted this app to look going in but I wanted to try out a few of the layout ideas on paper first.
I wanted everything to be accessible to the user upon loading the app so that it was easy to know where things were located. I also wanted to include a progress tracker so the user would be congratulated for milestones.
Because there are several tasks that the user can complete in the app, I wanted them all to be easy to access and easy to use.
I conducted two rounds of usability studies during the development of the Arcaid app (one for the Lo-FI Prototype and one for the Hi-Fi Prototype). Each round had the user adding credit to their game card.
User does not want to click too many things to get to what they need
Users want to talk to someone when booking an event
A more robust account system
The picking of dates and times on the tasks was too confusing
Users were confused as to when an event planner would call them
The original home page featured a different image and intro text for each task; however this was found to be redundant and removed. The account information was also fleshed out a bit more, as well as the scheduling system.
We don't want users getting hung up on anything in the process of using the app. That said, it was imperative that when the user is reloading their card, ordering food or booking an event, that the process is easy and intuitive.
Based on insights from research, one of the features I knew we needed to include for users was the ability to reserve a table and pre-purchase game credit on their cards.
While I found that reserving a table would be unique to the Arcadia app during the competitive audit, I also found that ordering food straight to your table form the app was also unique.
These features will free up a lot of time for the user to spend doing what they please at the venue.
After usability studies, it was apparent that users really wanted the ability to edit their information and add new cards to their account. Sometimes users will have multiple cards for different children and need the ability to rename these cards to match whom they belong to.
I thought it would also be a great idea to be able to see and manage the amount of money on each card too, just in case parents or guardians wanted to monitor their children's spending.
While designing Arcadia's app, I learned that your first ideas and wireframes are only the beginning. As research, critiques and usability studies roll on, you may end up with something very different than what you originally set out to create. Keep an open mind and always be willing to reiterate your designs and ideas.