Puzzle Hunt
Sponsored Project: CicLAvia + Project-Based Learning
Duration
16 Weeks - Fall 2022
Main Roles
UX Research
UX Design
Photographer
Team Ocelot
Christian Suarez
Noelle Tobias
Julia Wetterdal
Juan Zitara
16 Weeks - Fall 2022
UX Research
UX Design
Photographer
Christian Suarez
Noelle Tobias
Julia Wetterdal
Juan Zitara
CicLAvia, a non-profit organization whose mission is to create vibrant public spaces, encourage alternative methods of transportation, and to bring together communities throughout the greater Los Angeles area. They strive to do this mainly through their many open-street events that create day-long car free streets. SMC IxD was split into six different teams each with a different event lens to look through and help improve. Team OCELOT was looking through the lens of physical event experiences.
During CicLAvia events, to progress along the route attendees must ride through various hubs containing different sponsor booths. While some sponsors are easily recognizable and well-known companies, others are small or new groups unknown to the public outside of their local areas. Thus, these smaller booths do not receive the same amount of visitors.
In order to bring more attention to their spaces, some sponsors both small and large involve visitors through various activities. While this can be a great way for CicLAvians to participate in more ways than just racing through the event, activities end once people leave the booths. Another way sponsors choose to draw people in is through free merchandise and swag, which is something many participants look forward to most when attending CicLAvia.
The puzzle hunt creates a unique route-long experience that isn’t limited to a single booth or hub. It can be strategically used to bring more CicLAvians to lesser known booths and gives sponsors an opportunity to easily engage in discussions about who they are and what they do. For those who look forward to going home with memorabilia, they can take home a one-of-a-kind event specific collectable and display it in its own dedicated frame.
We began the research phase by creating a research plan. Considering the scope of this project and the importance of creating something that would be implemented in an actual CicLAvia event it was important to have an organized and structured approach to our research. Each team member performed their own various form of research (secondary research, mood boards, competitive analysis) and then we came back together as a group to review and synthesize our collected data.
We conducted virtual interviews with multiple real world experts with knowledge and experience in physical event experiences. These experts included a CEO & founder of Design in Color, the public engagement lead at NASA JPL, a senior manager of the LA Metro Art Program, and president & co-founder of CARS. Their past experiences and current positions provided them with valuable knowledge that gave us further insights into this lens.
We created surveys to gather both qualitative and quantitative data and surveyed event attendees at our own booth space. Due to our specific lens, we also created a survey for the sponsor booths to better understand things form their point of view. As this was an all-day event we also did observational research around the many various booths at multiple hubs.
We reviewed the data we gathered from the event and placed them into clusters based on similarities. We used these clusters, our prior research, and the interviews to form insights and identify opportunities. Next we created multiple how might we statements and selected one to move forward with. Using the HMW we created a physical journey map of possible ways to improve the user experience at the five points of entice, enter, engage, exit, and extend.
