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AR mobile app design for Download Festival 2024
The Problem
Design an app that first-time users — at a festival, outdoors, with patchy signal and no attention span for onboarding — could pick up and understand in seconds. Fail here and the whole real-world mechanic (walk somewhere, find something, collect it) never gets used.
The Approach
I stripped onboarding to the absolute minimum needed to start playing, then designed the core loop — explore, discover, collect — to sit alongside the festival experience rather than compete with it. Every UI decision was stress-tested against outdoor legibility: strong contrast, oversized touch targets, hierarchy that reads at a glance in daylight. Before launch, flows and states were reviewed against real-world conditions rather than just in-studio, and assets were optimised specifically for performance reliability on a wide range of devices in a high-load environment.
Outcome
Live at Download Festival 2024, the app let attendees discover and collect digital items across the site in real time. It proved the concept — a location-based mechanic can add a genuine interactive layer to a major event without pulling focus from the event itself — and the field data from launch fed directly into refining the next iteration.
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