15 Minute Activity
"You’ve been asked to work on a digital, interactive system to help people discover amenities and services at a large shopping mall / center. The primary target audience are people who have never visited the shopping mall / center before. The system should include at least a map."
Introduction
I approached this design problem by asking myself why a person would go to a new mall. The person could have been in the vicinity and had some free time. Therefore the person would have no particular agenda during his or her visit at the mall. Another possible scenario is that the person is going to this new mall for social reasons such as meeting another person. In this case, the person has a specific task to accomplish: to find a certain location. This is the opportunity for a new visitor to “discover” the mall’s amenities and services while accessing the directory.
Overall Idea
Given the existing parameters at malls today, I decided to design an interactive mall directory. This directory features different ways of sorting a long list of items for users to most easily and comfortably browse and find the specific element they want. For example, the stores can be sorted by zones, grouping the stores based on location and a location-based order compared to sorting them by category (which is another option in this design) like clothes, accessories, or food.
Amenities
The focus of this design is on the amenities and services of malls. Each colored item can be selected, which shows all of that type of amenity and the best route to get to each option. In the left picture, “Restroom” is selected, which causes the store colors to fade away, and the focus is drawn to the amenity itself. The user may select a specific amenity by pressing the floating bubble. This causes the map to zoom in on this one path, and written directions are shown below the map as well. This applies to the stores as well.