Overview
Spanning 1,783,005 sq ft and housing 450 different stores, the Metropolis at Metrotown shopping mall is the largest retail shopping complex in British Columbia. Our proposed project was to provide a new shopping experience for the benefit of mall customers.
With various difficulties that customers faced, our interface was to target these and use them as touch points for an enhanced shopping experience.
Research
When researching the needs of Metrotown shoppers, we discovered the primary difficulties that customers had and narrowed our main features down to: navigating the mall, searching for stores, finding promotions, viewing upcoming events and parking functions.
Process
With these in mind, we ideated features that would cater to these problems through researching existing mall applications and similar products. We also concluded that a mobile app would be the best solution would be a portable device would be easiest to use during a shopping experience. Once we had these features in mind, we produced wireframes with to target the different goals of the user. As we were designing for a mobile app, we needed to ensure that the user would be able to have easy access to desired features and browse through the needed content. For example, browsing through the various mall promotions in a “Pinterest” layout style to view the visual content quickly and easily.
In order to stick with the existing Metrotown branding, the app utilized parts of the colour palette, such as the shades of gray and orange (indicating interactivity). We also used a sans-serif font similar to the existing Metrotown brand, along with a flat aesthetic.
Though our testing sessions did provide us with a positive response, there were still things to improve on. For example not having text at a readable size and that the parking feature wasn’t used as much. We were also required to produce a “kickstarter” video for our app. We also have a working demo of the app available.
Collaborators: Wesley Chin, Allan Lee and Denise Chen.
