It all started with an idea for the improvement of my visual experience around my city.. Every time I am out and about, strolling along the streets of my city, I often see an empty space where there used to be a building. Historically, I wondered what building in that empty space would have looked like? For instance, after the second World War there was a lot of destroyed areas within the city of Brno and sometimes new ugly buildings arose on those empty slots of land.
The more I tried to discover what the previous places looked like, the more I got consumed by the idea that I can bring the history back in the form of an interactive app. An app that would show all the lost and forgotten places in their former glory right there and then.
Create a historic app that would work only when users would be actively walking through the city. The App won't work from a sofa, instead the user would have to walk and get within a 20 meter radius of the selected location and only then the user can see the previous and already non-existing building. The user would read and listen to audio information, browse pictures and even watching videos.
To bring the history and architecture mixed with real past events and stories into one easy to use app. Make people walk and be active, while using this app. Create an app absolutely on a low budget.
This is the part that I really love and enjoy the most, because here is where all the ideas came to light. I endlessly drew on the wall and put down as many ideas that I came up with, based also on comparative research of other related apps.
Here I mapped all possible paths where the user could end up and this gave me a great opportunity to limit most of the errors that could occur on the way. To make it error free was the key here really, as well as, to achieve the simplest user interaction and page direction.
I did very basic wireframing, while I created the user flow.
When I created the prototype, I used all my previous work and incorporated those into a high fidelity prototype that I created in Figma. Why Fima? Its free.
This was the crucial part of the whole process, where I had five test subjects who went through my prototype and commented aloud their immediate thoughts on the feel and usability. No matter how great I thought the app was, the usability testing always surprised me and it opened my eyes to the problems and possible solutions that I never thought of before.
It will be an app that supports history, tourism, sightseeing, exercise/movement, education (schools, students of history and architecture), anybody who wants to know more about their city's history in an instance.
Users will be rewarded with free or discounted tickets to the cities main tourist attractions. Each visited location would score a point that will be added into users profile. When sufficient amount of points collected, user can claim their free prize.
This app would be launched in Brno, but it's an interactive map that would be prepared for the whole of Czech Republic. People can suggest locations and submit photos for approval. The App would then grow like mushrooms thanks to its users, even internationally.
The App will have audio recorded by some famous actor, whose voice is familiar to all Czech’s. The audio would describe the places and history to the user.
For a second phase of updates to Metropol, it will have the locations of real events that took place, real people stories, tracking of historically famous people, etc. At this stage, the app will already be used in other cities and regions, as it gets bigger by the day.
The whole idea is that people will have fun and it will be active, whereby people will learn about some long forgotten history in their cities and places where they live.
Proactively looking for development options to bring the app to life.
