Ho Jeng AR
Bringing smiles to the people of Hong Kong
Back Market
Refurb products with a brand new experience
Back Market
Refurb products with a brand new experience
Back Market
Refurb products with a brand new experience
APP DESIGN • GAMIFICATION • AR • ML
More than ever, the city of Hong Kong and its residents are in need of a bit of joy. We partnered with the Google Pi team to create ‘Ho Jeng AR’, a mobile app that combines machine learning, AR, and a rabble of playful characters to remember and celebrate the city’s wonderful culture.
Using the app, residents are encouraged to explore and uncover characters hiding within key cultural objects across the city. Once found they can be placed in AR space, played with, and shared with others. To achieve this, we collaborated with formidable teams at Google, Animade, and Bit Studio.
Back Market are a punchy start up from Paris who are fed up of seeing perfectly good electrical products go to landfill so they created a platform where old products could be refurbished and resold, giving them a new lease of life. As a five week sprint, I joined the product team in Paris to help explore new ideas and bring a fresh new approach.
Back Market are a punchy start up from Paris who are fed up of seeing perfectly good electrical products go to landfill so they created a platform where old products could be refurbished and resold, giving them a new lease of life. As a five week sprint, I joined the product team in Paris to help explore new ideas and bring a fresh new approach.
Meet Leni
Leni is the face of Ho Jeng’s machine learning. Leni was taught (Bit Studio) to accurately recognize six undeniable Hong Kong staples, one to unlock each character. When in 'scan mode', Leni is always on the lookout for special objects and when one does draw near — he struggles to contain his excitement. Leni is friendly and therefore also doubles up as a helpful companion, always on hand to guide people through the journey.
This is certainly not the world’s first retail platform so we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. Through extensive retail research we designed search with best practices built in and saved a little space for some quirks too.
Gamification & joy levels
Our characters love nothing more than to play — they would play all day if possible. With each playful tap, the character’s joy level rises and continues to become more animated. However, if they are neglected, they soon become disgruntled and call out for attention. If their joy levels become full, they will bust out a dance awarding the player a ‘Hypermode heart’ that can be traded in the store.
The store sells a collection of new character skins and multiplayer options to include all six characters in one scene. In addition, we introduced other gameplay mechanics by way of badges to reward the most determined players.
We analysed the environment of refurbished goods, the drawbacks, the reservations people may have. Essentially, it isn’t glamorous. Why can’t refurbished products be sold like they were from the Apple store? These are high quality products afterall.
UI & motion prototyping
Quick click and checkout
To capture the fun and joy our characters express in UI, we crafted a detailed library of cheerful icons and conducted focused experiments on each interaction with motion prototypes.
Text that talks about an amazingly quick checkout service with 2 clicks for registered users and how we really wanted to celebrate the reloving of the preloved and promote the swap possibility.
the team
the team
Sennep
Bridget Dawodu Product Manager
Christoph Lorenzi Technical Director
Alex Thurman UX & UI Designer
Matt Rice Design Director
Kin Man Leung UX & UI Designer
Google Pi
Shan Huang Creative Technologist
Eddie Azadi Creative Director
Animade
Ed Barrett Creative Director
Tom Judd Creative Director
Jim Wheeler Designer
Georgie Lister-Fell Product Manager
Bit Studio
Boon Panichprecha Creative Technologist
Pye Chinagarn Developer
Sennep
Matt Rice Creative Direction & Motion
Alex Thurman Creative Direction, Motion & Product Design
Back Market
Julien Laureau Product Design
Nassima Ouahrani Product Design
Tony Hagnéré Head of Product
Vianney Vaute Co-Founder & CCO