AdventuRe

Design Project Winter 2021: Revitalizing Small Businesses

The covid 19 Pandemic affected nearly every part of daily life for everyone, especially at its height when lockdowns were being instituted. Everything from social life to businesses were affected. Perhaps none more so than small businesses. Seeing this a group of young talented designers and I took it upon ourselves to solve this problem the only real way which we knew how: Design. 

Market Research:

With the goal of revitalizing small businesses, our team set about choosing a few local businesses in San Diego and conducting market research by asking them a few basic questions in order to gain more insight into their struggles since the pandemic. 

We chose to interview a relatively old and established business as well as a fairly new one that opened just before the lockdowns of the pandemic began in February of 2020 in order to glean information from a range of businesses with varying degrees of establishment and renown in their respective local communities.

We started off with Zia’s Gourmet Pizza, which is a well known pizzeria in the HillCrest area of San Diego that has been operating since 1999. We sat down with the owner Zaw Zaw Ok Taw to ask him a few questions about what his Pizzeria had been doing since the pandemic. 

How has your business been affected since the pandemic started?

Initially it wasn’t so bad. People kept coming and eating here; however traffic to the restaurant really took a hit once the lockdowns in San Diego were instituted. Because we do not offer delivery and only a pick up and dine-in option we were severely limited. The majority of the money is made when big groups come in and stay a while and dine in as opposed to people ordering a pick up. So when this shift occurred the revenue definitely took a hit. 

Who would you say is the main demographic of the group that most commonly frequents your place of business?

I would say that the majority of people that come in to eat are generally Gen-Z’ers. People who are in the mid-twenties to late Thirties. This is the group that saw the biggest drop in foot traffic and they were our primary customers. 

How did you adapt to this?

Our business gained its reputation and renown mostly through word of mouth. When the pandemic started to affect our business we started to double on the take away orders. I have experienced very little success in running marketing campaigns on social media and so I tried to completely avoid this as I felt this would be a waste of time based on my past experiences.

What would you do differently?

I would want a way to more directly interact with and communicate with my customers. The heart and soul of my business is built on being able to interact with my customers as well as the ambience and atmosphere that I create here when all of my customers are dining in!

The second business that we decided to interview was a fairly newly established business that opened in the middle of the pandemic called Grappling Dynamics (a martial arts school). We asked the owner Brandon Magana the same questions and he told us this:

How has your business been affected since the pandemic started?

We have seen very little turn out since the pandemic hit . Before the pandemic started we had a few classes that were just beginning to take off however we were getting more and more popular by word of mouth.

Who would you say is the main demographic of the group that most commonly frequents your place of business?

I would say that the people that most commonly frequent my business are people in their late 20’s to late 30’s.

How did you adapt to this?

There really wasn’t all that much that we could do. Running social media campaigns for a business like a martial arts school doesn’t always work too well especially when the market (especially in a city like San Diego) is saturated with them. There was not much we could do except just bear in mind that business would eventually pick up. The heart of my business relies on mostly word of mouth as well as social interaction because this is after all a martial arts school

From our interview with these businesses our team learned a few crucial things:

1. We couldn’t rely on traditional social media campaigns, they would get lost in a clearly already overly saturated market

2. Social interaction between the business owner and customers as well as between the customers themselves is the heart and soul of these small businesses 

Understanding that we couldn’t rely on traditional social media; and that social interaction is the foundational element of these small businesses our team saw the perfect opportunity for a use case of AR. Despite the fact that AR is currently in its infancy and there is not much data on the retention rate of AR apps the team understood that we needed a way to facilitate social interaction in a way that traditional social media simply couldn’t do. We needed some way to guarantee that customers would step out of the comfort of their homes into the real world.

Current data also shows that 71% of consumers would shop more often if they used AR and 35% of AR users are between the ages of 16-34 years old are aware of AR which clearly includes the biggest demographic frequenting these businesses. As a result we decided that an AR game that incentivized social collaboration and interaction would be the best way to do this!

User Insights: Competitive Analysis

The team and I first set about conducting a competitive analysis of prominent AR applications in order to gain a basic understanding of the technology’s strengths and weaknesses. The applications that we focused on are : World Around Me, Smartify, Google Maps (AR navigation), Night Sky, Horizon Explorer.

From our competitive analysis, we gleaned three key insights: 

1. Most of the apps outside of Google Maps have a very specific audience and medium that they are targeting

2. There isn’t much incentive to actually use the AR app outside of curiosity and novelty

3. There was little to no social interaction present within the apps

   
   
   

Most AR apps don’t encourage collaborating within the AR space which is precisely what we we aim to address with our app.

From our insights the team devised three preliminary features that we wanted to explore in our application. The first is a reward system.. The next feature is a navigation system similar to that of google maps. The last feature is a social system to work with friends.

Wireframing

Based on the insights from our competitive analysis, we began to create wireframes of some initial ideas of how our AR application should function and look. Pictured below are some of the teams initial sketches:

Improved Wireframes and Sketches

After having done our initial ideation in creating the wireframes and sketches, our team then took the features we felt key to the app and iterated upon them. These features were the socialization feature, the navigation feature and finally the tasks feature:

Low Fidelity : Prototype

After developing a rough idea of how we wanted to integrate the key features we began to create a low-fidelity prototype whose interactions outline how the user experience would roughly look like.

Our low-fidelity prototype was used primarily as a tool for mapping out the layout of all the features and how they would possibly look in two dimensions and then to the AR space . In the interest of time we were not able to properly user test our low-fidelity product.

The main features we improved upon, when going from the low-fi prototype to the hi-fi were the rewards system and socialization features. Based on the critique from our peers, in the high-fidelity prototype we visualized how the reward system would would pop and be used since this feature was not present in the low-fidelity prototype. For the social feature, we mainly focused on the user being able to add friends, see how far away they are, and view their (friends’) rank but we did not implement how a user can interact with their friend’s avatar in the AR feature and a chat with which they could communicate with their friends. Seeing that socialization was supposed to be one of the main features of this AP , our team made it a point to later include it in the hi-fi in order to further encourage social interaction in AR through gestures and chat messages in order facilitate more social collaboration. 

High Fidelity Prototype

Future Improvements

After conducting some user-testing with 5 of our friends to gather feedback we realized that all of them like the app concept and are excited to use more of AR in the real world. However there are plenty of things we would love to improve on. If given more time, we would like to develop a real AR system using software like blender and Unity rather than a secondary app. To make our app more interactive, we think implementing a shop feature to buy clothes for avatars and a customization page would be stimulating. Lastly, to promote collaboration we want to have tasks that can be done in groups. This gives more reason to make friends with people and also attracts more users to our app.  In retrospect, if we were to have done this project differently we would have spent more time on features that emphasize the AR aspect of our app such as integrating more ways to socialize in real time in the AR space. Going back to the insights we learned from our market research we have to understand that small business owners want to be able to directly communicate with their customers. So in order to better facilitate this, an additional feature of the app that would allow business owners to directly chat with their customers when they (customers) enter their place of business. We will also allow business owners to directly create games in the AR app which will be conducive to customers to come into their establishment.