Academic Project
Step City is a mobile app designed to transform everyday physical activity into a gamified urban adventure. By combining real-world exploration with virtual city-building mechanics, the app encourages users to discover their surroundings while staying active. User research and iterative design refined the concept into a more intuitive and engaging experience that better addressed users' needs.
Our team was challenged to uncover and design a solution to a user need.
Our team's journey began with a simple observation about urban life in San Francisco: hills are universally considered a miserable part of daily commutes. This sparked our initial question:
This led to our first concept, Hill Kill, a mobile game where users would climb real-world hills to defeat virtual hill-themed monsters. With excitement, we presented this early concept to potential users for feedback.
The response was sobering. Users didn't connect with our hill-slaying concept.
"Why would I log into it and not Apple Fitness?"
"Why not just use Pokemon Go at that point?"
"I wouldn't go out of my way to kill a mountain on an app. I wouldn't go out of my way to download it. I wouldn't feel excited."
This critical feedback forced us to reassess our approach and return to square one.
Rather than focusing narrowly on hills, we expanded our research to explore broader health and fitness motivations. Our interviews revealed three key insights:
From these insights, we developed the following persona:
A young person who recently moved into a new city, seeking both physical activity and urban exploration.
With deeper insight, we reformulated our guiding question:
Our answer was Step City: a mobile game where players build an imaginary city by physically exploring and exercising in their real-world environment. The tagline captures this perfectly:
Visit real-world locations to unlock virtual blueprints of landmarks. Step stations are physically placed throughout the user's city.
Complete physical challenges to earn building materials, with more difficult quests yielding greater rewards.
Use collected materials and blueprints to construct a personalized virtual city.
Central monument that visually represents the user's ongoing achievements.
Visit friends' cities, trade materials, and collaborate on quests together.
We presented our concept to faculty from Northwestern's Segal Design Institute, professional designers from Atlassian and New Computer, and fellow Northwestern students.
The project reinforced an essential design lesson: initial ideas must be validated with users. When our initial concept failed to resonate, we pivoted, returned to user research, and ultimately developed a much stronger product that better addressed user needs.
Start with user-centered research. The biggest mistake was getting attached to a solution before fully understanding user needs. The time spent developing Hill Kill should have been spent talking to users.
