pipa

Exhibited: European Media Art Festival 2021

Project Overview

pipa is a contactless sharing system for games and sports equipment in your local park. The “pipa-boxes” are provided with special Bluetooth-padlocks, which can only be opened by the respective user within the application. Give your games a new chance to be used and benefit from others. The project allowed us to go through a whole design process starting with the idea and finishing with the programmatic implementation.

My Contributions

UX-Design, Conception, Illustration, User Research

problem

There are countless situations in which you are already sitting in a park, alone or with friends. Out of the blue, everyone feels like playing something, but no one brought anything with them. In such moments, there is nothing left to do but go home and bring a game with you afterwards.

These park games are of course a lot of fun, but in the end they are often used far too seldom. Thus, numerous objects gather dust in wardrobes and attics, while people always play the same game in parks and wish they could try something new.

  • Maria spends a lot of time outside. She lives in a shared flat and doesn't have her own balcony or garden. In summer, she almost always meets up with her friends in the park around the corner. Together they enjoy the good weather. Maria has brought along Viking chess. The bag is not so easy to transport because it has no real handles and is also quite heavy overall.

    During the afternoon, Maria notices the new benches that have been installed in two places in the park. On closer inspection, she notices that there are lockers hidden inside.

    She reads the logo "pipa" and scans the QR code next to it. The code directs her to download an app. In a few minutes, she sets up an account and verifies it with her PayPal account. Then she is shown the location of the corresponding pipa bank on the map. There is still a free safe deposit box there - perfect! She quickly takes a photo of the game and specifies exact components and errors. The app then shows her which locker she can put the game in. She opens it by clicking on a lock symbol and holding the mobile phone nearby. Now she doesn't have to carry the game back and forth all the time and other people can enjoy it too.

    Maria’s sister Birgit did not know pipa before, but is very enthusiastic about the concept. She remembers that she also has a game lying around at home that she hardly ever uses. The next day, Birgit deposits her game in the pipa bank. She hopes that other people will enjoy her game and that she will use it more often when she passes the park. From now on, Maria's family regularly meets in the park to play boules or to test new games.

questionaire

In order to get feedback on our idea right at the beginning, we used an online questionnaire. This way, we were able to get a comprehensive overview of the requirements of our future users. We learned that the young generation in particular would be interested in our service, but also some older people who have children or grandchildren, for example.

A critical point that we had to consider in the further process, is that the majority of respondents want to lend games, but are not willing to give away their own games or equipment. The main reason for this is lack of trust, i.e. the fear that something might be stolen or damaged. We took this problem as a challenge to create exactly one service where we pay significant attention to this problem and try to find a solution. In addition, we received further suggestions through qualitative answers in our questionnaire, so that we found out that many people would like to have more seating in parks.

Solution

Components

Application

Bluetooth Lock

pipa Box

Registration and first steps

For the usage of our app a user account is inevitable. The user can add profile information such as name, photo, area and an individual text to make the profile more personal and trustworthy for other users. In addition, every user has to link their profile to an existing Paypal account. Through that, we create a secure system in case of theft or damage to property: a fine can be collected in case of emergency.

Homescreen

There are three cards on the home screen which provide an overview of all currently relevant information and possible actions.

A red mark on the card also indicates how many new messages have not yet been viewed.The top card contains news that are informative, but not tied to time-bound functions such as give and take.

Give and take are the two main functions of the applications and are each tied to time slots. That's why the color of the cards is supposed to draw special attention so that users don't forget their appointments.

Take

The Take tab contains the function of borrowing third-party games and sports equipment. First, the user is directed to a map and asked to activate their location detection.

On the map, the user’s location is indicated as an outlined green circle. It contains various markers at places where parks with pipa boxes are located. A white card provides information about the park and its availability. Touching the card opens a larger representation of the park, where all available pipas are listed in tabular form

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