ABOUT
Barcelona is a beautiful city, due to this reason it's population and the crowds in the city are growing intensely, especially in the summer months. Living there for a year, this was almost an impossible fact to avoid, thus came the inspiration for Gauge.
Have you ever wanted a quiet walk out in the city, or the park, the least crowded walk or commute to work? Or alternatively, a bar that's buzzing or the queue entry to a club which you know might get very long and ruin the vibe of the night? Then this app is for you. Some apps, such as Google Maps, show how busy particular restaurants, shops or roads are but not the general crowded areas around the city or how busy a particular mode of transport is. This is where Gauge is different, it shows real-time crowds around the city so that you can gauge your movements to suit your ideal situation. Making life a little more stress-free.
PROCESS
This project was about concept to ideation of a project, including initial concepts, user research, prototyping and testing of the product.
RESEARCH
The research was carried out through a Typeform questionnaire in order to determine the main pain points of a user when in crowded situations.
It was decided to initially focus on transportation and avoiding crowds in these situations, with the aim of expanding to social situations at a later stage.
69%
Of users surveyed often find themselves in crowded situations.
3/5
Either avoid crowds at all costs or deal with them if they have to.
120%
Alter their time of travel or take alternative transport as a way to avoided the effects of crowds.
19%
Said they move to find space on crowded modes of transport.
1/2
Said that crowds specifically are the worst part of their journey.
The full results report can be seen here.
CONCEPT SKETCHES
Initial sketches to determine the architecture or layout of the product, in order to make navigation as intuitive and stress-free as possible. After all, who wants to use a frustrating app in order to try to de-stress their plans for the day?
VISUAL OUTPUT
One of the complexities of the project was working out the clearest visual output to the user of where crowds are generally. These were the top output options, the darkest red shows the most densely populated areas and green showing least populated. After testing with users, it was discovered that the third was the clearest and most popular output.
This initial concept was dismissed due to crowds of people not generally forming a linear form of congestion.
This concept was highly considered and a favourite with some users, however, it was decided that the number of people is not necessary in this case and it still did not show the flow of people.
This was the chosen overall concept as it clearly shows fluidity of movement of people in a general area.
PROTOTYPES
Wireframes in black and white were initially created, with the inclusion of some colour outputs to make some areas more clear for the user. More visual design of the layout will come at a later stage.
INITIAL LAYOUTS
LATEST PROTOTYPE
The prototype was created in Sketch and linked to Invision to incorporate interactivity. Watch the video below to see Gauge in action or to interact with the prototype yourself, click here.
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