On December 25, 2021, I received a special Christmas present from my friend Joanne: a copy of the San Francisco Chinese Directory her grandpa left for her, with a short memoir about her family history written by her uncle along the side. (Joanne is the 4th generation San Franciscan growing up in Chinatown and her paternal great-grandparents came to SF during the height of the Gold Rush in search of Gold Mountain.)
San Francisco Chinatown was portrayed as “a place in which the forces of marginalization allowed a premodern authenticity to flourish” by the 1880s bohemians. As time goes by, Chinatown has become a place where tradition shares space with modernity: the community has been trying to fend off gentrification while welcoming change.
Continuous rising rents and changing populations were already whittling away some of the oldest local businesses. Most of the businesses in the directory could no longer be found; for businesses that survived staying in Chinatown for over 100 years, businesses lost an average of 70% of revenue at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The factors contributing to increased business closures, commercial vacancy, and gentrification in Chinatowns have existed before the pandemic and have only been exacerbated. In order to help the Chinatown community to advocate its historic preservation and local businesses, I spent time doing research, experimenting with AR, and designing a mobile food tour guide to invite a broader audience to take a walk in this historical ethnic enclave and unfold the history.
Project Duration
18 Weeks
Process
User Research & Synthesize
Ideation
Wireframing
Design & Prototype
Usability Test & Synthesize
My Role
UX Research, UX Design, UI Design
Tools
Figma
Adobe XD
Sketch
Miro
Invision
Project Summary
WokWalk is a mobile food tour mobile app designed to guide, inspire and help tourists discover restaurants and historic designations and be more involved in the local community. Chinatown visitors can utilize AR features with audio guides to participate in a scavenger hunt to explore stories and myths of historical sites while enjoying delicious local-favorite food.
1. User Research & Synthesize
Secondary Research
Spending time searching for Chinatown’s authenticity, I realized the tradition of Chinatown has gradually dimmed along with the decline of businesses due to several main factors:
1. In the face of encroaching gentrification, the long-term residents and local neighborhood institutions alike struggle to keep up with rising costs.
2. As a large amount of the younger American-born-Chinese generation is eager to leave their community to seek better opportunities, they could not care less about validating their cultural preservation.
3. Fear and rhetoric related to the coronavirus that had been detected in Wuhan, China; meanwhile, hate crimes against the Asian community were drastically increasing.
Between 2000 and 2009-2013, Greater Chinatown’s median household income fell by 36 percent, and its poverty rate increased by 18 percent. As shown here, Core Chinatown’s poverty rate had more than doubled the rate of the surrounding neighborhoods by the end of 2013.
Amidst the extreme rise in percentages of rent in Chinatown, residents are very vulnerable to displacement.
Primary Research
After doing Secondary Research, I reached out to SF Chinatown locals including 4 hospitality business owners, 1 community associate from the Chinese Culture Center, and 3 Chinatown visitors. Conducting interviews with them helped me to arrive at a better understanding of Chinatown's social milieu and the visiting experience.
Guiding questions:
· What makes San Francisco Chinatown a memorable place to visit?
· How long do you think a first-time visitor should spend in Chinatown?
· What would make visitors more interested in learning the culture and history of Chinatown?
· What are some of the most common tools visitors use to find resources and places to visit?
HMW’s
After synthesizing data from the interviews, I came up with several How Might We (HMW) statements to clearly communicate the most important problems the locals and visitors want to solve.
· How might we optimize the visiting experience with limited travel guidance resources?
· How might we relieve people's sense of being overwhelmed when they try to find a good dining spot?
· How might we alleviate the inconvenience of communicating with locals?
· How might we introduce Chinatown's history in a more interactive and fun way?
· How might we make visitors feel their time is well spent at SF Chinatown?
I, then, did more research and took information from public archives and private collections: digging through the Chinese directory, seeking resources from the famous Chinatown food tour guide Sherry Fong Torres and reading other historical archives, I tend to be as knowledgable as a local guide.
2. Ideation
After analyzing interviews and doing research, I found surrounding vendors that serve the 9 most authentic food that differs little from the days of the Gold Rush to represent the taste of Chinatown. The collection of historical sites offers a time travel experience through food for tourists and locals alike.
User Stories
Creating and ranking user stories allowed me to focus on what would create an MVP (Minimum Valuable Product).
High Priority - Must Have
· Map/ location guidance and GPS tracking
· Historical sites introduction
· Audio guide
· Food recommendations
Medium Priority - Nice to Have
· Review and share visiting experience
· Reward system to encourage users to visit vendors
· AR and gamified elements to create a more immersive visiting experience
Low Priority - OK to Have
· Time estimation
· Translation
User Flows
User flows were then created to more clearly defined what screens would be needed to create an MVP and assess efficient tasks.
3. Design & Prototype
Lo-Fidelity Wireframes
I created low-fidelity wireframes to focus on the layout as opposed to the color and artwork. This refined the designs more and allowed me to scrutinize iterations and navigation options.
Design
Then I started to focus on developing 2 ways to explore the 9 sites around Chinatown:
1. The free exploration mode: it gives users the freedom to choose locations based on their own preferences. It could be the food that interests them the most or the location that is closest to them.
2. The other way is the central feature of this app, which is the guided tour mode. Through this feature, users will participate in a scavenger hunt to unveil Chinatown’s history through a linear timeline order.
Once the journey begins, users will be guided by a Chinatown delivery man or tray man. Tray man was the first and only food delivery service in America in the late 1800s. Hence that I created the 3D model of a delivery man and rigged him in Blender to set him as the AR food tour guide.
After arriving at the destination, other AR features and historical contents will be activated by scanning the storefront； meanwhile, visitors are encouraged to learn more about the neighborhood and its roots by completing a series of quests designed to support local businesses.
Here is a screen-recorded video demonstrating the testing of Interactive Audio Augmented Reality at Chinatown.
(Enable audio for better experience! :)
In order to help the visitors with more guidance, I embedded SFSpeech to Text Recognition to make the order and dining experience more informational.
This feature would also help users when they are confused about the names on the menu and encourage cultural exchange communication with the locals.
Inspired by Joanne's sticky notes attached on the directory, I decided to create the review and sharing experience through AR Sticky Notes allowing users to share their memories and leave their reviews in the AR space.
Each individual unique experience and feeling could be expressed through the their own preference of color. It provides more business opportunities for the local neighborhood institutions. And here is a video demonstration of leaving a note for the next visitor.
Last but not least, I created a SparkAR filter to promote WokWalk on Instagram:
Conclusion
As the sole UX designer for this project, I am happy and proud looking at what I have created. Throughout the entire process creating different features for this user-central product, I had a lot of technical and design challenges and I have learned a lot every step of the way.
Moving forward, I’d like to continue developing this product and refining each features. To make this product even more immersive, it'd more interesting to see this product to:
· Integrate AR Tracking Geographic Locations actually in SF Chinatown
· Connect with local vendors to refine provider a better reward system
· Collaborate with Chinese Culture Center to provide more exposure for local artists through the AR space