“Three Body Problem”
Immersive Experience
Role
UX Design
UI Design
Motion Design
Timeline
2022.06 - 2022.08
"Three Body Problem" Immersive Experience is a 2-hour journey that transports the audience into the sci-fi realm of "Three Body Problem" through immersive theater, interactive installations, VR, AR, and AI technologies, spanning over 3000 square meters.
ABOUT
Audiences experience "The Three-Body Problem" story firsthand with immersive storytelling, integrated tech interactions, and split-line gameplay. There are 16 interactive device experiences. To start the interactive experience, audiences need to use an NFC-enabled smart bracelet. Acknowledging the audience's desire for immersion, especially in the interactive part, we noticed that guidance from actor NPC and on-site personnel can hinder immersion, raise costs, and risk delays. So, before the second iteration, we updated the 16 interactive tasks flow adding the guiding part, and smart bracelets response to improve audience immersion and streamline the experience.
Responsibility
I collaborated with a team of 7 designers and 3 product managers, closely working with the development team. In the research phase, I crafted questions for researchers and conducted one-on-one user interviews. This led to the creation of the tutorial for the interactive installation, our final solution. I also took the lead in defining the complete user flow for the smartwatch responder within the product team and designed high-fidelity sketches. Furthermore, I worked with engineers to implement the final solution.
Official trailer
CHALLENGES
Product
-
How to add the tutorials into the interactive experience with gameplay where the user's expectations for experience are overhigh but not clear.
-
How to create a well-done experience and whole functions for smart bracelet to meet the whole experience requirements.
-
How to use AI capabilities to create digital products to facilitate immersive experiences
Business
-
Create the best immersive experience around the world.
-
Ship the products on time. (Only 4 months for design)
-
RESEARCH
Goals：
-
Understand user behavior.
-
What are the points of satisfaction and dissatisfaction of target users with our products?
Methods：
-
Surveys: Collect questions in the product design team and provide them to researchers to start surveys.
-
Interviews: Once surveys are complete, we did interviews with our users to understand users concerns and behaviors deeper.
Participants：
-
Interviewer: Product managers, UX designers.
-
Interviewee: Users aged 25-35 who are interested in our product and sign for us.
SURVEY
Because the show has not disclosed yet, we can only survey our target audience who participated in the first round user test and signed out NDA. Researchers sent out 100 surveys to target customers in Shanghai and sorted out a large number of data reports to us. I sorted out the information we needed and made it into a chart to make the team members more clear about the data we need to focus on.
Result:
-
Audiences are more dissatisfied with interactive experience than plot and performances etc.
-
There are a few interactive experience impressed them, such as: "hibernation pods", "ingredients collection" and space mining, although the interactive experiences get the lowest rating.
INTERVIEWS
After understood the data from the surveys, we were able to recruit 8 people, who were selected based on their survey answers.
Questions：
-
What is the reason that you rate the interaction part low?
-
Can you describe the whole process when you experience the interactive projects?
-
Have you encountered any problems during the interaction?
-
How long does it take for instruction each time? And why？
-
Is it clear when the actor explain you how to play with it? If no, then why?
-
What kind of experience do you hope to get in our whole experience?
LEARNING & FINDINGS
Through in-depth conversations with users, I found that our users can be divided into two categories, one is focusing on the interactive games, the other is focusing on watching drama and interacting with actors. Since their problems are different so I built two different personas.
Interactive experience
-
Spend a lot of time on learning the interaction.
-
Cannot be immersive when actors instruct me the games.
Theater performance
-
The performance is not that consistent when interaction crossing between.
-
Easy to get lost in the space.
DEFINE GOALS
Through this series of research, I came up with a solution concept that is to change the information architecture of features, establish tutorials in the beginning of each interactive experience, replacing the instruction of actors, to provide audiences with a seamless interaction experience. Audiences can understand how to interact with screens and equipments at a glance and solve the problem of audiences which is hard to quickly learn the interaction. Also, to save more time for NPCs and make audiences have more opportunities to see performance.
DESIGN IDEATION
Collaborating with the team to brainstorm and develop solutions.
We have a total of 16 interactive experiences, and the most difficult part is each one have different gameplay and interaction methods. For example, some are using Air-touch (AI technology), others are based on screens or AR/VR. To clarify them clearly. I drafted the user journey map and flow, then organized meetings to discuss with other shareholders and designers. We usually get online video meeting, because we are located in different cities.
Here is the workflow in this phase:
-
Identify the locations for interactive tasks in the space and categorize them into different areas. (This will impact timecodes and the split-line story)
-
Work with the game designer and scriptwriter to define each interactive gameplay and its corresponding story background, creating user flows for each.
-
Develop a user journey map that integrates user activities and experiences to figure out responses and information for the devices.
-
Based on the journey map, sketch out the initial ideation for the first stage.
Due to the extensive range of experiences totaling 14, I will provide examples of one project to illustrate the design process: "Space Mining" and "Hibernation Pods." These projects are of the highest priority and represent significant challenges for me.
Hibernation Pods
Experience Flow
User happy path behavior analysis corresponds to user interfaces
Physical Attributes
Sketch out ideation
USABILITY TEST
I made an interactive prototype of each experience to have the usability test. And I organized 7 people to test and ask them to finish the test tasks. The purpose is making the whole user flow smooth and figure out if the current design is easy-to-use for users.
When they finished the tasks, I had an interview with them one on one to talk about the details more specifically.
According to the test and 1v1 interview, I found some problems still need to optimize. For example for the hibernation pods experience, I found in the demo game, the wording may make some of them confused then affect on users learning it.
For each experience, my testing process is welcome, introduction, do the task while observing, then interview, finalize the test report, which includes users basic info, task completion statistics, pictures and video records, interview feedbacks notes, main findings and iteration suggestions to have a concept for the iteration at the wireframe phase.
Wireframes
Visual Design & Motion Demo
