PastZurich Update: User Testing, Three Lenses, and a Lively AR Experience

The previous version of pastZurich offered an immersive experience but was geographically tied to the historical site on Sechseläutenplatz. This update intended to remove this limitation. In developing the app further, we focused on specific goals:

• The app should become completely location-independent so that it works just as well in a schoolyard as it does in your own living room or in a park.
• Replay value must increase significantly to motivate users to use the app multiple times, rather than closing it after a single visit.
• The story of the pile-dwelling people should no longer be merely passively consumed, but actively experienced by users.

To achieve these goals, we’ve integrated new gameplay elements that go beyond traditional AR viewing.

Users can now collect resources and use them to build their own houses step by step. This core loop gives users an active role and provides long-term motivation. In addition, we’ve included an entertaining archery minigame. It breaks up the purely informational content and offers an exciting, playful challenge within the AR environment.

Personal opinions and assumptions within the development team are all well and good, but to gain real insights, there’s no substitute for talking to the target audience. In connection with the update, we therefore conducted an in-depth user test in collaboration with the Office of Urban Planning.

We invited eight people from different age groups and with diverse demographic backgrounds. The goal was to find out how the new gamification elements were received and how the new location-independent feature affects behavior within the app.

What’s often fascinating about user testing is how people’s different backgrounds shape the “lens” through which they view an app. During the tests, we were able to recognize clear patterns and identified three distinct user types who approached the experience in completely different ways:

• First, there were the gamers, for whom progress in the game was clearly the main focus. They wanted to collect resources, build, and move forward quickly. Our most important insight here was not to disrupt this group’s flow with overly long text passages.
• The map readers exhibited completely different behavior. They focused so intently on the 2D map for orientation that they largely ignored the AR world. This called for clever visual cues in the design to gently redirect their gaze back to augmented reality.
• Finally, there were the passionate info nerds. They took an enormous amount of time and read through all the historical facts about the pile-dwelling people in great detail. For them, it was crucial not to overload the interface with too many game elements in order to preserve the historical immersion.

The biggest challenge in UX design is bringing together precisely these conflicting needs into a single, intuitive interface. Thanks to the clear insights from testing, we knew exactly where fine-tuning was needed.

We optimized visual cues for navigation, made the game loop smoother for players, and at the same time ensured that the historical facts remained accessible and unobtrusive. The result is a completely revamped pastZurich that strikes the perfect balance between gaming and knowledge transfer.

This completed project clearly demonstrates that it’s only through feedback from real users that a good feature becomes a great experience.

If you’d like to learn more about the pastZurich app and its technical implementation, check out the pastZurich case study.