Grandfather Road

Summary

Grandfather Road is an attempt to make learning about Singapore's heritage and history fun and shareable. The result is a hyper-local quiz to explore neighbourhoods via roads, sprinkled with local terms/slang and imagery. 

Background

The team started with the simple question of how much people know about the area or neighbourhood they live in, and how we could help them learn more about it.

We focused on roads, as they are most widely available and all around us, instead of focusing on specific heritage buildings or areas where some might be lacking. To validate our idea on the interest in roads, we did two things:

• We surveyed friends, family and colleagues on how much they knew of the origins of their neighbourhood roads e.g. Why is Simei called Simei, or Did you know there is a Kay Poh Road in Singapore? It was generally met with curiosity but didn’t motivate people to dive deeper into it.

• We looked online to see if this information was widely available. It was in bits and pieces across various blogs, websites, videos, and sites or PDFs created by NLB or NHB. However, these were not easily findable or purpose-made.

We found that users were generally interested in the names and history of streets they live on or near, but needed more of a push to act on that curiosity.

Product Goals

The goals for the product set by the team were to ensure the product was:

• Visually attractive: To entice users to look at the product and learn more about the roads

• Fun: For users to enjoy the learning experience, and for the designers to be able to stretch their design skills

• Shareable: To entice users to share it forward, and get others to learn in the process

Approach

The team tried several directions on how the product could work, including:

• A quiz-like product to test users on the history of the roads near or around them.

• A game inspired by Back Of Your Hand, in which users are given a street name and have to pinpoint it on a map.

• A walkabout adventure through different districts, explaining the heritage and history of roads found in them.

We eventually decided to go with a quiz, since it achieved two of our three goals (Fun and Shareable, as there was an element of competition). We turned the geolocator idea into a question format in the quiz, and expanded it to include pictures of historically significant landmarks to identify the streets they’re on. 

The team also considered building pages for each street, so users could explore and find the histories of specific streets or roads if they wanted to. These pages could then be used in geolocation settings, such as exploring the streets near the users. Once these features are built, they could also be expanded to landmarks, historically significant buildings, statues, or entire areas.

We dropped the idea of the walkabout adventure, as there have been prior similar attempts made by other media outlets, and since it was very specific, it would take a lot of work to generalise it.

Other competitive elements were added in the process, such as the introduction of regions for the users to select, building on the eternal (but unofficial) East vs West and South vs North competition. This helped narrow the questions to a more personal and familiar area for the user. 

Each region features iconic visual elements that follow the user across the site. e.g. Central has the Dragon Playground in Toa Payoh, and North-East has the iconic rainbow HDB in Hougang. 

The pages displaying your quiz scores were also customised by region to emphasise the game's competitive aspect, and add an element of fun. We initially thought of using a 0 to 10 scoring system, but later decided to make it more familiar by using A+, B, C, D, E, and F grades to mirror how we’re scored on tests in a school setting.

Examples of the result screen

Our grading was initially set to:
9 - 10: A
8: B
7: C
6: D
5: E
<5: F

But when we tested prototypes on users, they felt the scoring was too strict, and getting Ds and Es was demoralising. We later relaxed the scoring slightly (while still maintaining the high standards an Asian parent would expect):
8 - 10: A
7: B
6: C
5: D
<5: F

To keep players on their toes, we added a scoreboard showing how many people from each region ‘passed’ the quiz:

Outcome

The quiz can be found here. On Demo Day alone, we had 151 people who played the quiz with 51 passes, 100 fails, and 5 people scoring an A+. Asian Parents we are.

In the week after Demo Day we had a steady trickle of people playing and sharing the quiz, with 534 people playing, 209 people passing, 325 people failing, and 29 people (that we’re very proud of) scoring an A+.

Team Members

Lennard Lim - Product Manager
Pearly Ong - Product Designer
Khaleedah Sairi - Product Designer
Thoo Wan Ling - Software Engineer
Siddarth Suresh - Software Engineer

Special Mention Contributors
Shanty Basrur
Russell Chan