Inspired by the various influential cult movements around the world, Cult Starter Pack is a satire app that provides people with a step-by-step walkthrough on how to start their own cult, instead of falling into an existing one.

The walkthrough is divided into five sections that are fundamental to build a strong foundation of a convincing cult. Each stage has to be done sequentially in order to understand the intention and motives before moving on to the next step. Every step has a piece of interactive elements that helps understanding the goal of each action.

Process

Given three weeks to explore tools for Graphical User Interfaces, the cohort was challenged to build an interactive mobile app to story tell a topic of something they are passionate about. The learning goal is to understand the power of interactions to engage an audience with the subject matter more deeply.

The concept of cult-forming seems abstract and vague, hence the idea of solidifying the brainwashing method in the most ubiquitous form of a mobile app sounds like a fun challenge to tackle. Starting from the first week of the course, most time was spent in storyboarding, wireframing and exploring ways of storytelling in the most concise manner.

After having a finalised storyboard in mind, the second week was spent refining the visuals and making a low-fi interactive prototype to ensure the pace and context flow well. A user testing was done by the end of the week to gather feedback about their experience of going through the flow and understanding what is unnecessary to keep the story short and concise. There were many discarded frames and interactions in order to lighten the mental bandwidth of completing each stage. The third week was fully spent on exploring the possible interactions that can be done in Origami. It was fulfilling to see the whole piece come to life.