Liseplay

Designing for enhanced experienced atmosphere

In this project, Rasmus Andersson and I designed with focus on the physical dimension, with the goal to enhance the experienced atmospheres of the park areas. Not the easiest words to interpret but to put it simple, if you are walking in a garden styled with a typical Victorian theme, you should not only admire how pretty it is, but also feel like you have actually travelled back in time to the Victorian era. If there is an intention that the garden also should be playful, the user experience should also enhance that playfulness.

The project had a scientistic focus, since it was our master's thesis project. We defined our research question as:

Which guidelines should be considered when designing digital artefacts for enhanced experienced atmosphere?

As well as the complementary research question:

Which factors from the physical dimension should be considered when designing digital artefacts in the context of a theme park?

Objectives

Liseberg presented several objectives to us, of which we decided to mainly focus on the following:

Make queuing more entertaining

Visitors generally spend much time queuing to attractions. Queuing is seen by visitors as the most boring part of a Liseberg visit.

Attract visitors during low season

Liseberg gets lots of visitors during holidays and weekends, but not as much during the rest of the year. What if more locals would come back to the park more often?

Physical experience in focus

A digital product should not take focus from the physical space. Visitors should not walk around and just look in their phones.

Enhance themes

Liseberg has recently started to make a journey from being an ordinary amusement park to a theme park. The park will have more distinguisable areas with different themes in the future.

Communicate areas and their names

Visitors should know what themed areas Liseberg has and what they are called. In the past, areas have been quite anonymous and weak.

Liseplay

To test different ways to make use of the narrative and surroundings, as well as taking Liseberg's objectives into consideration, we created a concept prototype of a game application. We called the application Liseplay and it featured ten different missions connected to different areas in the park. The connection between the application and the physical dimension varied from textures and style, to narrative, sounds, emotions, theme and challenges involving physical interaction. Please see the full report below for detailed explanations.

Full report and presentation

The full master's thesis report can be easily read through for those interested. It is only 132 pages long. There you will find everything about our background research, our process, methods, ideas, testing and analysis. Also, you can watch the presentation we held at the end of the project for a 'shorter' version:

The result – Factors and guidelines

This project resulted in a set of factors to consider when designing digital artefacts in the context of a theme park, as well as guidelines to consider when designing digital artefacts for enhanced experienced atmosphere. A summary of these can be seen below, but please check the full report for a deep dive into each of them (page 106–119).

Takeaways

When designing a complementing digital artefact for a physical experience, there are loads of traps to fall into, and tons of things to take into account.

The actual application prototype was developed more to test different ways to enhance the experience, rather than creating a great product. By analysing the test results, we could summarise the findings with factors and guidelines as presented above. This shows how much testing and trying different approaches is absolutely necessary when working in this environment. We both think the resulting factors and guidelines would help us a lot if we would ever be working within this context again.

Maybe you would like to see more of my creations? Or maybe even contact me?