Background

The Book »Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now« by Jaron Lanier served as a guide throughout the seminar. WARP addresses chapter 5 »Social media is making what you say meaningless«. Lanier describes how a situation/text/photo/… can lose its meaning by taking it out of its original context. Further he points out that leading social media platforms are replacing the users context with their own. As a user you can’t control in which context other users will see your content.

WARP is an attempt to attach a post to its original location and therefore context. Users can pin a virtual post onto a »real-life« location. To explore and view posts users have to be in a certain radius around the posts to be able to read them.

Existing services with a similar function, like nebenan.de, Pokemon GO and ebay Kleinanzeigen helped us to form and iterate on the idea. WARP’s content is strongly influenced by notes of Berlin (further referred as NOB). NOB is a platform that publishes sticky-notes that where placed somewhere on Berlin’s streets. These’s notes have a strong connection with their location and sometimes result in interesting (or funny) conversations. WARP can be seen as a digital interpretation of NOB.

Visual Inspiration

As for the visual appearance, we we're aiming to not make slick & sleek minimalist design, as you can find plenty of those in contemporary UI-designs. We are rather going for a pixel art inspired approach, which leans on our concept of gamified incentives we've dispensed throughout our concept. (Such as ranking lists, levels, collectibles, map exploration.)

Creating a »pixel-perfect« design and taking strict pixel-bound grids into consideration was a challenge in and of itself, however it also showed the importance of a well-structured design library.

Besides that, the analysing and exploring of 8-bit videogame menu/gaming-interfaces was fun!

Structure

WARP’s main structure consists of five sectors: Explore, Top Votes, Pinventory, Messages and Profile.

With opening the App the user jumps into the Explore screen. A map of the user’s current location is visible, as well as every post that was published around that location. A post within a certain radius around the user can be opened. Post outside the radius need to be approached in order to access them.

Another factor that limits the content is time. Every post is limited for a certain time span and will expire. The colored circle around every post indicates the left-over time.

If the user opens a post the option to comment or vote appears. It is possible to either give the post an upvote »FAME« or a down vote »SHAME«. Posts with a high response will be visible in the Top Votes. This section is separated into two parts: Walk of Fame and Walk of Shame. This section offers the possibility to explore content that is not limited to your current location but rather serves as a collection of the most upvoted or downvoted posts. Since posts will disappear after a certain time-span there’s one section to archive favorite posts – the Pinventory. This is also where user’s can find all of their own published posts. The section Messages provides space for private conversations that can be started from the posts. The Profile shows information about a user.

For the further development of this project we planned to add more functions. For instance giving the user’s a higher incentive to use the platform by receiving points after publishing a post. Bit by bit the user can level up and enable certain functions. This part has not yet been elaborated in total.

Another key characteristic of WARP is that you have to use pre-definded categories for a post. Gamer, Eager Beaver, Hunter, Gatherer, Lover, Loner, Villain, Hero or Other. The definition for each category is shown in the picture above.

Workflow & Conclusion

The Project is the result of an iteration process which lastet for around three months. Many functions and ideas that we originally planned where smoothed out along the way. We had to realize that a simple concept soon can become too complex. 

The whole project was built using Sketch. Since we decided to go for a »pixel-based« design we additionally had to figure out a good workflow to make that happen. That included creating our own Icons as well as an Icon Library. This design decision made the project more complex and yet more interesting.