A quick design exercise accomplished over one weekend.
Lost in the Crowd
During a crisis, many people turn immediately to their mobile devices for assistance and information. One such situation occurs when parents lose track of a young child at a crowded theme park.
Assume an application about that park would be installed on devices of a large number of guests and workers. Design a feature of that application that could help quickly reunite parents with their device-less children.
Due to lack of theme park in my area, as well as time shortage, I decided to go to the playground in my neighbourhood to find parents of young children ans ask them about this situation.
Before going there, my initial idea for such an app would be a crowdsourced solution, where parents would be able to initiate the alert, and let other parents find the missing child via the app. But my assumptions were completely disproved after that day.
Here are the questions that I asked parents on the playground:
1. What is the first thing you would do if your child got lost in a theme park?
2. Would you be OK with sharing your child's info with other parents in the park or park administration?
"I wouldn't want anyone else know my kid's missing."
The short interviews completely changed my idea about the app, and I decided to focus on the following feature idea:
- displaying the child's profile within the theme park app (assuming that parents can create the profile for their child when they enter the park)
- displaying the park administration contact information
