To bring some much-needed respect to today’s world, Santander launched In Someone Else’s Shoes, an immersive experience designed to create empathy for individuals that may live a very different life than your own. By using groundbreaking augmented reality, the experience invites users to spend some time in the shoes of a 35-year-old nurse’s assistant who lives in her car. They can see, firsthand, how she lives, the choices she makes, and the struggles she faces, giving viewers a different perspective on the rising cost of living and the employed homeless it affects.
My Role: As a UX Lead on this this project I was responsible for planning and documenting all aspects of the experience. I worked with external technology teams to create the actual experience and provided them with guidance. I created documentation and prototypes to communicate with visual designers and clients, keeping everyone on the same page for the ultimate goal of the experience.
The Problem: Change the public’s perception of a bank from cold hard corporate machine, to caring empathetic agency of social change.
The Thinking: Through a large brand act, we aimed to dial up the brand message of “Respect Adds Up.” To truly respect someone you would have to walk a mile in their shoes. If we could virtually bring users into someone’s world we could achieve this goal.
The Research: We explored a variety of topic to bring to light for this act and what we landed on was “Working Homeless.” To dig even further we work with a local homeless shelter to interview and here stories from the many folks who were homeless while also holding down a job. The stories were heartbreaking, but gave us plenty to work with for a narrative for our story line.
The Solution: Create and AR experience that brings users into the world of a woman who is employed, but living out of her car. When user truly feel empathy for this person, they will be encouraged to download an app that will track their steps and Santander will donate $10 for every mile walked toward a charity that supports this cause.
Challenges We Faced: When we started our planning we knew how we wanted to get users into the experience and what we wanted to achieve, but we were keeping the concept technology agnostic. As we began to work out feasibility we faced a number of technical challenges. One of them being using an AR marker(the graphic the anchors the digital object in place) that aligned with Santander branding and had enough contrast to trigger the experience. The biggest challenge we were worried about, was having enough users not only download a fairly large app, but also allow access to their location services to track miles. It turns out we didn’t need to work because we reach thousands of user and hit our donation goal (of $200,000) fairly quickly. While we had plenty of great PR for the event the biggest criticism was that all the money used to create this experience could’ve gone right to the charity, but it would not have raised awareness like we did with this project.
The Pay-Off: The goal of this project was ultimately to make user feel empathy for the character’s life they were watching. When you see tears rolling down the cheeks of someone totally engrossed in the experience that may have just walked into it for the free headphones, that’s a pretty special feeling. As many projects like this we worried about engagement, but after the second day (of a 3 Day Campaign) we were almost at all our goals we’d set. Between all I learned about the tech and the success of this project, it’s definitely one of my favorites.
