Saving New York During a Zombie Apocalypse

Project Overview

The level 4 challenge of the Product Design Super League competition was to design a mobile application that helps residents find and safely navigate to a food source.

Role

Research, ideation, wireframing, hi-fidelity prototyping, usability testing

The Challenge

A zombie apocalypse has broken out in New York City. If you get bitten by a zombie, you’ll become one. Infrastructure has broken down and resources have become scarce — especially food.

You are the product design team in charge of saving New York’s population by designing a mobile application that helps New York’s residents navigate safely to a food source. Please include the most essential steps that a user would follow to find and reach the food source using the mobile app that you have designed.

The Situation

The Product Design Super League is a 5-week project-based learning competition put forth by Light Hall, a live-streaming education platform. Each Monday a new challenge was given to teams that advanced, and each Friday the challenge for that week was due. I led a team to complete this challenge (Level 4) which ultimately advanced us to the fifth and final round.

Research

Since this task allowed us to be very creative, we started by doing research to figure out what we should actually include in this app. I searched the internet what people thought would be the best way to find food in the event of a zombie apocalypse in real life. I also looked at articles about foods with the best shelf life and that were densely packed with nutrition.

Assumptions

At this point into the apocalypse there is still food left at stores and markets and/or the government is helping to stock or allocating foods at these places
The Government or a third-party is managing this mobile app and keeping it up-to-date with the latest information
People still have access to their cell phones, wifi and networks

Competitor Benchmarking

Although there were no true "competitors", I looked at the Geocaching app for design inspiration since it had the same concept as the challenge- using the app to navigate to something. I also took inspiration from the Google maps app for the map feature since Google provides an industry gold standard for user experience.

Onboarding Screens

We creating 3 onboarding screens to help the user understand the purpose of the app. We strived to keep the onboarding screens clear and useful.

Food Sources

The home screen shows low risk food hubs. The user is able to filter them by category if desired. The home screen also provides resources such as small scale farming and plants in the wild. Once the user chooses a food hub, they will be directed to a map view that shows distance and the users proximity to zombies. The user can then find additional information on the food hub such as terrain, risk and stock scores and latest updates by authorities in the surround area.

Navigation

The "Find" icon on the nav bar leads the user to the first screen where the user can see their location and proximity to zombies. The user then can search food hubs. In this example, the user has selected the filter for grocery stores. The user can further narrow their search by selecting filters based on terrain, stock and distance. Once the user zooms in on the pin points, the exact hubs will spread out on the page as seen in the third screen.

UI

I hand drew the dark map screens using Procreate. The remaining components were made with Figma and Canva. Icons were from the Material Designs system.