Arthur Zhu

Interactive — Mobile guide

Bauhaus Walk

The Bauhaus Walking Tour is an integral part of Weimar’s cultural landscape: guides show visitors what it means to study, learn and live at this unique university. During my master’s at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar I helped design an immersive companion experience.

Period
2018 – 2019
Role
Design & concept
Context
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Link
Bauhaus Walk program

The problem

How do you let visitors experience Weimar’s Bauhaus heritage — past and present — beyond the fixed schedule of a guided tour?

My role

Concept and design during my master’s: ideation, prototyping, technical research and user testing for an immersive walking-tour companion.

Core decision

Success is measured by how little the interface is used. Every second on the screen is a second not spent looking at the building.

The outcome

Many of our core features were incorporated into the officially released app.

Bauhaus Walk concept

The work in depth

01 ChallengeHeritage is available continuously; access to interpretation is not. The centenary made that gap acute.

The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919. The Bauhaus Walking Tour is a fixture of the city's cultural life — student guides walk visitors through the sites where the school began and show what it means to study and live at the university that succeeded it. The tour is not a museum experience; it is people showing other people around a place they actually inhabit.

We worked on a companion experience for it during my master's at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, in the run-up to the centenary — a year when the city expected significantly more visitors than its guided tour capacity could absorb.

That framed the problem. A guided tour is limited by scheduling and by the number of guides available. The heritage is available continuously; access to interpretation is not. The question was how to let visitors experience Weimar's Bauhaus history — past and present — outside the fixed schedule, without producing a thin substitute that competes with the thing that makes the tour good.

02 The design constraintsThe interface competes with the thing it is about — and the environment is uncontrolled.

The interface competes with the thing it is about

This is the defining constraint of heritage applications and the one most of them fail. The purpose is to make someone look at a building, a street, a place. Every second spent reading a screen is a second spent not doing that. Success is measured in how little the interface is used, which inverts almost every engagement metric a product designer normally optimises toward.

The environment is uncontrolled

Outdoor use means sunlight on a screen, gloves in winter, one hand occupied, ambient noise, and GPS that behaves unreliably between buildings in a dense historic centre. None of these can be designed away; they have to be designed around.

Pace is set by the visitor, not the product

People walk at different speeds, stop where they find something interesting, double back, and take breaks. A linear experience that assumes a fixed sequence and duration breaks the moment someone deviates — and deviating is the normal behaviour of a person exploring a city.

Past and present are both the subject

The brief was not only historical. The tour shows what the Bauhaus was and what studying at the university is now. That dual subject shaped what the companion had to carry: not just archival interpretation of 1919, but the living institution occupying those buildings today.

03 My roleConcept and design within a student team, prototyped on the actual route rather than at a desk.
  • Concept ideation for the companion experience and its relationship to the guided tour.
  • Interface and experience design for use while walking.
  • Prototyping to test concepts in the actual environment rather than at a desk.
  • Technical research into what was feasible for location-based delivery on site.
  • User testing with visitors and students.
Add the specifics that turn this from a description into a case study:
  • How many people were on the team, and what did you own versus contribute to?
  • How did you test — did you take prototypes out onto the route? What happened?
  • What did testing change about the concept?
  • Which specific features were incorporated into the officially released app? Name them. That is the strongest fact on this page and it is currently unspecified.
04 OutcomesCore features incorporated into the officially released app.

Product

Many of our core features were incorporated into the officially released Bauhaus Walk app — an unusual outcome for academic work, and the clearest evidence that the concept held up outside the studio.

What it taught me

Designing for a physical environment removes the assumption that the screen has the user's attention. That constraint has stayed useful in every product I have worked on since — including in-store scanning at Penny, where the same conditions apply, and in any flow where the interface is not the reason the person is there.

Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 1
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 2
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 3
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 4
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 5
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 6
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 7
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 8
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 9
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 10
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 11
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 12
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 13
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 14
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 15
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 16
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 17
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 18
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 19
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 20
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 21
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 22
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 23
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 24
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 25
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 26
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 27
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 28
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 29
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 30
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 31
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 32
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 33
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 34
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 35
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 36
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 37
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 38
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 39
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 40
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 41
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 42
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 43
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 44
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 45
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 46
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 47
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 48
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 49
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 50
Bauhaus Walk — presentation slide 51

Let’s talk.

LinkedIn Contact References Resume (PDF)