MOA — MY ORIENTAL ARCHETYPE cultural UX · gamification · AI-assisted build

THE QUESTION

Can we discover what people respond to in traditional Korean aesthetics — without showing them traditional art first?

Korean culture travels globally through music, drama, fashion and food. Traditional visual culture is different. Patterns, colours, animal symbolism and philosophical concepts are still often introduced by explaining what they mean first.

We wondered what would happen if we reversed that process.

What if people chose first — and discovered the culture behind their choices afterwards?

MOA started as an experiment in whether traditional Korean aesthetics could work inside a playful contemporary UX, while generating useful insight into what international audiences actually respond to.

WHAT WE WANTED TO TEST

The idea was not to ask users whether they liked Korean traditional art.

Instead, we wanted to observe choices that felt intuitive: busy or clean, creature or pattern, defined or flowing, gentle or strong, open or contained, calm or fun.

Those choices could begin answering more practical questions. How much visual complexity do people accept? Do they respond more naturally to figurative or abstract motifs? How might traditional colour, space and symbolism work when translated into contemporary digital experiences?

So we designed MOA with two layers:

For the user, it is a game. For us, it is a cultural UX experiment.

WHAT WE BUILT

MOA is a short, gamified web experience built around nine intuitive choices.

Three questions help generate a personalized character. Six additional questions quietly capture reactions to visual density, motifs, structure, colour, space and emotional tone. Those insight questions do not determine the user's result; they are there to build a dataset around collective aesthetic preferences.

At the end, users receive a downloadable partner character inspired by six animals from Korean and East Asian cultural traditions — Horse, Tiger, Dog, Carp, Rabbit and Goose — combined with three energy states derived from Water, Wood and Fire.

The experience then reveals the cultural story behind the character, moving the user from:

play → choice → personalization → cultural discovery.

The complete journey was designed to feel like an experience rather than a questionnaire: enter, play, choose, anticipate, receive and explore.

The app marked 99% completion rate and 85% download rate, showing high user engagement.

MY ROLE

MOA was developed from the ground up as an independent experiment.

I worked across the research question, communications concept, data logic, user journey and content design, including how cultural elements could be translated without turning the experience into a lesson.

We separated questions that determine the personalized result from those used purely for insight collection, mapped the character logic, designed the reward and cultural-discovery journey, and used AI-assisted development to turn the concept into a working web product.

That process also changed what was possible for me as a communications practitioner: I could move from identifying an audience question to designing the research, experience and working prototype around it.

Experience Moa here

WHY GAMIFICATION?

A conventional survey could have asked many of the same questions.

But that would miss part of what we wanted to test.

MOA deliberately presents itself as a game with fun choices and characters, while the research layer sits underneath.

The personalized character gives users a reason to complete the journey. Downloading and sharing turns the research output into something they can own. And the cultural explanation comes after curiosity has already been created.

In other words, engagement is not decoration added to the research. It is part of the research design.

WHERE IT GOES NEXT

MOA is currently a proof of concept rather than a finished research product.

The next phase is designed to test the experience with real users: whether they complete it, obtain and share their results, and whether traditional visual elements continue to work when presented through playful UX rather than conventional cultural explanation.

If the model produces useful behavioural data, it could provide a lightweight way to test assumptions before larger cultural communications projects are developed — from visual simplification and character design to colour, motifs and campaign tone.

The larger question is straightforward: can we replace some of the guesswork in cross-cultural communication with observable audience choices?

PROJECT AT A GLANCE

9

Playful choices

18

Personalized character outcomes

2 LAYERS

Personal result + cultural insight