UX consultant on the AR experience — shaping the spatial interactions, mini-games and quest flows, and designing the UI around them.
Produced by Ado Ato Pictures, an Emmy award-winning studio based in Los Angeles and Amsterdam, known for merging technology, culture, and storytelling into groundbreaking immersive experiences.
- UX Consultant
- Research
- Strategy
- UI
- Augmented Reality
- Game Design
- Company
- Ado Ato Pictures
- Team
- Touba (UX consultant and UI Designer) · Tamara Shogaolu (Director) · Riyad Alnwili (Producer) · Lucas Castelo (Producer)
Anouschka is an immersive Augmented Reality (AR) storytelling experience developed by Ado Ato Pictures, an Emmy Award-winning studio known for pushing the boundaries between cinematic storytelling and interactive media. The project blends AR gameplay, animation, archival footage, and interactive quests to tell a deeply layered narrative exploring colonial history, cultural identity, and matriarchal lineage. At its core, it invites players to step into the world of Anouschka — a young violin prodigy — and experience her journey through exploration, puzzles, and emotionally driven storytelling.
My role
As the UX consultant, I shaped how players experienced the AR journey— structuring UX for the mini-games, challenges, and overall interaction flows. In addition to UX, I also designed the UI for the supporting app features, including the app theme, landing pages, buttons, hints, and interaction states, ensuring visual consistency and clarity throughout.
Impact & recognition
I’m proud to have my name credited alongside an incredible team of artists, designers, and storytellers. My contribution to Anouschka is officially acknowledged on the project’s website (opens in a new tab) by Ado Ato Pictures.
- 2023IDFA DocLab AwardWonBest Digital Storytelling.
- 2024Netherlands Film FestivalNominatedBest Digital Culture Production.
- 2024Cinekid FestivalShowcased
- 2025Dutch Directors Guild AwardShortlisted
- 2025SXSWPremieredInvited to premiere internationally.
Discovery & UX strategy
The project was complex, with each AR interaction and feature having its own nuances and no existing UX framework. As it was my first AR experience, I quickly educated myself on AR best practices. I needed a clear plan to convey interactions, mini-games, and flows in a way that the team could understand and implement effectively. This framework was grounded in research, user insights, and best practices for accessibility and usability.
Market research
Competitive analysis
To ground our design decisions, I conducted a competitive analysis of similar AR and interactive storytelling apps. The evaluation went beyond visual design to include narrative depth, inclusivity, usability, and overall gameplay experience, helping us identify both best practices and gaps to improve upon.
- Worked
- Didn’t work
| Melatonin | The Memoir Blue | Sayonara Wild hearts | Pokemon GO | AR Dragon (IOS) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Storyline | Worked: An emotionally grounded story the player feels rather than watches. | Didn’t work: Plays as a run of cut scenes, with little connection to situations a player recognises. | Worked: Grounds the player in situations drawn from real life. | Worked: Convinces the player that Pokémon exist in the world around them. | Worked: A baby dragon to raise and care for, framed as looking after a child. |
| User Interface | Worked: Hand-drawn, illustrated interface. | Worked: Realistic and emotionally pitched. | Didn’t work: Sharp and visually loud, at the cost of usability. | Worked: Animated and easy to navigate. | Worked: Animated and pitched at children. |
| Colours | Worked: A consistent palette that keeps every level recognisable. | Worked: Restrained and naturalistic. | Didn’t work: Harsh, high-contrast colour that becomes uncomfortable to look at. | Worked: Soft but vibrant. | Worked: Playful and soft. |
| Music | Worked: Scored to the action beat by beat, and carries the mood. | Didn’t work: Flat, and does little to hold attention. | Didn’t work: Sometimes at odds with what is happening on screen. | Didn’t work: Sometimes at odds with what is happening on screen. | — |
| Gameplay | Worked: Simple controls that place the player inside a believable world, built on familiar real-world objects such as a card machine. | Worked: Easy to play at every stage, simple or difficult — the game always makes the next action clear. | Didn’t work: Fast-paced, with heavy colour contrast and shifting camera angles, so the player rarely knows what is coming next. | Worked: Deliberately slow, because play depends on walking outside to find Pokémon. | Worked: Easy and engaging for children: they feed the dragon, care for it and play with it as they would a pet. |
| Usability | Worked: Strong. The player always knows when a task is complete and what follows it. | Didn’t work: Weak in play. The next action is often unclear, the boat scene being the clearest example. | Didn’t work: Undermined by the pace: shifting angles and sudden events leave the player disoriented. | Worked: Better than its peers. The player is guided forward and shown how to select each step or object. | Didn’t work: Good for its age group, though children are sometimes left without guidance on what to do next. |
| Accessibility | Didn’t work: No visible way back at points during play, which closes off parts of the experience. | Didn’t work: No visual cues for navigating within a level, so the player is left without guidance. | Didn’t work: A real barrier for older players: inconsistent camera angles and navigation make it hard to get into. | Worked: Uses icons rather than text, which map to the real world and read faster. | Didn’t work: Average, and weaker for children — buttons are unlabelled and their purpose is not always clear. |
| Controls | Worked: Easy to understand. | Didn’t work: Hard to understand. | Didn’t work: Difficult throughout. | Worked: Easy to use and navigate. | Didn’t work: Hard to understand. |
| CTAs | Worked: Buttons carry both an icon and a label, so the action is legible two ways. | Didn’t work: Only a joystick prompt for steering and pressing, with no short tutorial to introduce it. | Worked: Set in the theme colours and a distinctive typeface, giving a vintage feel and carrying the game’s LGBTQ palette. | Didn’t work: Playful but ambiguous — on “Please choose your style” the back control at the foot reads as an item rather than a button. | Didn’t work: Consistent, but without the feedback needed to understand what each button will do. |
| Popups | Didn’t work: Average. They report the score but never why it was low. | Didn’t work: None at all. | Didn’t work: No feedback on completing a stage; the player is simply moved on to the next. | Worked: Written plainly enough to teach as they go, such as “Time To Walk”. | Worked: Thorough, and guide the player steadily through the game. |
| Action Controls | Worked: Builds tension before an action, so the player can read the moment and time the shot. | Didn’t work: No usable prompts in play: nothing tells the player which control applies to the task in front of them. | Worked: Builds tension before an action, so the player can read the moment and time the shot. | Didn’t work: Little guidance on how to catch or reach a Pokémon once one appears — “A Wild Pidgey Appeared”, and nothing more. | Worked: Well guided and sized for its audience: “Bigger Actions For Easy Access For Kids”. |
| Subtitles / Captions | Worked: Captions before each level explain what is being asked, such as “take a shot when the ball reaches the bat”. | Didn’t work: No captions and no walkthrough, leaving the player to work out the mechanics alone. | Didn’t work: Subtitles in the story, but no captions inside a level to explain how to play it. | Worked: Captions and dialogue boxes are used well, and guide the player throughout. | Didn’t work: None, as the game has no storyline to caption. |
Learning from existing user feedback
To better understand real user pain points and expectations, I analysed app store reviews and community feedback from similar AR storytelling experiences. Reading real experiences gave me valuable insight into what players loved — and what often caused frustration — helping guide key UX decisions.
Three of those boards are here — Melatonin, A Memoir Blue and Sayonara Wild Hearts. Open one to read the reviews I gathered and the plus points and pain points I drew out of them.
Moodboarding & Visual Exploration
To define the visual tone and interaction feel of the app, I created moodboards by gathering references from a range of AR and storytelling experiences. I explored different approaches to key elements such as layout, interactions, colour aesthetics, and motion to establish a cohesive direction that balanced immersion with clarity.
The references run across AR utilities, narrative games and arcade games, set against the studio’s own palette.
User research & insights
Personas
The client provided the personas for this project, developed from a series of user interviews they had run. They represented the four key user groups the experience had to work for.
Empathy maps
Working from those personas, the app reviews and the interview answers, I mapped what each player says, thinks, does and feels. The aim was to find which persona would struggle most with the AR experience, so the UX could be built to carry them rather than only the confident ones.
Read one at a time, they are a comparison: the same four quadrants for five different people, and the differences between them are what the design had to absorb.
User journey maps
I created a comparative user journey map by analysing similar AR and storytelling apps. I structured the journey into key stages: Awareness, Search, Conversion, Onboarding, Intro, Gameplay, and Satisfaction, which informed the design of Anouschka’s own interactions and mini-game flows.
During the journey mapping process, I identified several key areas where the experience needed improvement:
- The initial flow closely mirrored common user pain points found in similar AR apps.
- Onboarding and early interactions risked feeling overwhelming, especially for less tech-savvy users.
- Gameplay pacing could create friction and break narrative immersion if not balanced carefully.
The findings directly shaped key UX decisions — such as simplifying onboarding flows and pacing challenges more evenly — ensuring users could stay immersed in the story rather than getting stuck in the mechanics.
Custom UX framework
Wireframing the AR Experience
AR cannot be wireframed the usual way. Most of what a player touches is 3D and spatial — a portal opening in their own room, a gesture made in the air — and none of it holds still on a screen to be drawn as a box. So what I handed over was a documentation system rather than a set of frames:
- Skeletal wireframes for structure — the rules, logic and gestures behind each AR interaction, with a note on every frame describing the behaviour a flat drawing cannot show.
- Story-style flow sequences, one per mini-game — each interaction, transition and expected response, written in the order they happen.
- A complete copy specification — every CTA, prompt, hint and level message in one table, so the build team could implement the text directly rather than write it themselves.
UX Documentation, Annotations & Copy Specification
Every word the app says was written and specified before it was built — buttons, hints, quest prompts and level messages, each one in a table the developers could implement from directly rather than invent as they went.
Each mini-game was then documented as a story: the interactions in the order they happen, what changes between them, and what the player is expected to do at every step.
Between them the two kept design and development pointing the same way — less to interpret, and one consistent tone and logic across the whole app.
Accessibility & usability
UI Exploration & Interaction Guidance
Once the UX foundation was in place, I transitioned into UI exploration, with a strong focus on accessibility, clarity, and ease of use.
Visual exploration
The client asked for handwritten type over textured grounds, to give the app the feel of something archival rather than something new. I worked through stone and paper textures that scroll behind the interface, which gives it depth and age while keeping the text on top readable.
Six typefaces were tried against those grounds — Brazilia, Skreeble, Stupid Meeting, Manana, Miggoe and Beblock — and buttons were drawn twice over, once hand-drawn and once on paper texture, to see which held up at the sizes the game needed.
A component library for the build
Reusable components for buttons, hints, popups, prompts and interaction states, so the app stayed visually consistent and the system could be extended without redrawing it. The icon set covers Start, Multiplayer, About, Quest, Pause, Close, Hint, ArrowDown, ArrowUp, CheckBox and CheckBox-Checked.
Hints system
A hint button for when someone is stuck, and the same hint offered on its own after five minutes idle or stalled on a step — so getting through never depends on knowing to ask.
Gesture guidance
Working on the two things that decide whether a player in a room with their phone up can actually follow what the game is asking:
- Gesture guidance — hand and motion icons showing the gesture a step needs, so a player learns it by seeing rather than by reading a paragraph mid-quest.
- Visual and audio feedback — micro-animations, haptics, popups and sound cues confirming success or error the moment an action lands, rather than adding a step to acknowledge it.
Outcome
Design Audit and Final Highlights
To ensure the developed app faithfully reflected the intended experience, I conducted a design audit, verifying that AR interactions, mini-games, UI components, and flows aligned with the approved wireframes, UX notes, and documentation.
Finally, to give an idea of the final outcome, here are a few snippets from the app. While the full experience cannot be shared due to project restrictions, these highlights showcase the gameplay, UI, and interactive elements in action.
Each note is a difference between what was built and what was approved, marked on the screen it appears on.
Screen grabs from the built app
Taken from the app as it shipped — the gameplay, the UI and the interactive elements in use.
Learning and takeaway
This project allowed me to explore the intersection of UX, UI, and AR, translating complex gameplay mechanics into an intuitive, accessible, and immersive experience. By combining research, custom frameworks, and detailed documentation, I was able to guide the team in delivering a cohesive experience that catered to a wide range of players — balancing engagement, clarity, and narrative immersion.
