CASE STUDY | MAY 2022

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comm

unity

Empowering individuals to join together and make positive community improvements

The Problem:

Generational poverty fosters ideas of being stuck, not thinking it is possible to, knowing how to, or possibly even not caring to improve quality of life.

Current market solutions provide grants that can be hard to obtain and harder to spend, or rely on those outside the community to come in and make changes.

The Goal:

Bring communities together and foster ideas of empowerment and working together to improve quality of life starting with small issues and working up to the larger ones.

Shift mindset from focus on surviving the day to thinking of and making future dreams a reality.

The Process:

A 16 week solo project consisting of UX Research, Planning and Prototyping

My Role:

All of them!

Research

RESEARCH

ASSUMPTIONS

Throughout the duration of this project, my fiancee and I have worked in a community that is heavily poverty-stricken. I have sat in on many discussions where teachers and school staff workers discussed the lack of involvement that parents and others living in the community have when it comes to school and other events happening in the community. When it came time to come up with an idea for my Capstone project, I knew this was it.

I was aware that I was coming into this project with assumptions and possibly some preconceived biases that I knew I needed to check at the door, but I wanted to use these to my advantage to define the problem at hand and use it as a jumping off point for my research.

MIND MAP

Along with The Problem and The Goal listed at the very top of this case study, I narrowed the assumptions from my mind map down into the following categories.

WHO STANDS TO BENEFIT & WHY?

Individuals - Improvements to physical/mental/financial wellbeing

Communities - Increase of curb appeal/togetherness

Local Government - More involvement from community members

HOW DOES THIS BENEFIT STAKEHOLDERS?

Bringing more people into the workforce

Putting emphasis on supporting small businesses to stimulate the local economy

Encouraging people to come together and make positive, visually appealing improvements to their homes/community

Improving emphasis on education, physical, and mental health in children

HOW CAN WE ENSURE A SOLUTION IS IMPLEMENTED?

Ensuring that local government/city councils are on board

Making individual community stakeholders feel involved in the process.

Not making community members feel isolated or overwhelmed by the process.

Once I got my assumptions in order, I started some desk research to test my assumptions. I wanted to gain some information on the most common effects of generational poverty and gain insight into the macro forces at play for those living in poverty. At this point, I also conducted a competitive analysis to see what competitors were currently on the market.

EFFECTS OF GENERATIONAL POVERTY

SCARCITY MINDSET

INADEQUATE HOUSING/INSUFFICIENT EDUCATION

POOR HEALTH

MACRO FORCES

ECONOMIC

Those living on public assistance

Working poor (never having been on welfare)

Little access to automobiles/technology

DEMOGRAPHIC

Race

Asian: 8.1%

Black: 19.5%

Hispanic: 17.0%

White: 8.2%

Marital Status

Married: 4.7%

Female Householder: 23.4%

Male Householder: 11.4%

Age

<18 y/o: 16.1 %

18-64 y/o: 10.4%

65+ y/o: 9.0%

POLITICAL

“Redlining” neighborhoods -

A discriminatory practice in which services are withheld from potential customers who reside in neighborhoods classified as 'hazardous' to investment

Poverty traps -

Losing welfare when obtaining a job but income not enough to cover living expenses

SOCIO-CULTURAL

High crime rates + drug trafficking

Broken families + dysfunctional schools

Isolated socially/economically

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

There are initiatives on the market to solve the same problem but most if not all are dependent on people outside the community either granting money that can be hard to obtain and even harder to utilize, or people outside the community coming in initiating change for the community.

None of the competitors I found provided a product that those living or working in the community could take and apply to their own communities.

SURVEY

Next, I wanted to get some input from potential users. I created a short survey using Google Forms that I posted in community Facebook groups, LinkedIn, and sent out to a few staff members in the school that I was working in.

efforts

Were improvement efforts made?

Survey Question Themes:

What strains are communities facing?
Were efforts of improvement attempted?
Were improvement efforts effective?

strains

What strains are the communities under?

effectiveness

Were these improvement efforts effective?

Survey Results:

As you can see, the survey results stack up pretty well to the information obtained through desk research with crime, education, housing and lack of jobs taking up the majority of the strains communities face.

Of the 15 people that participated in the survey, about 82% said improvement efforts were attempted. Of that group, about 56% said these efforts were effective.

interviews

Of those that participated in my survey, I conducted in-depth interviews with 5 people that indicated they would be interested in speaking more on the topic. From these interviews, I gained more knowledge on the strains they see in their communities, the efforts that had been attempted (or not attempted) and the effectiveness of said efforts.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Community Strains

In these interviews, it was stated that the main issues people see in their communities are lack of involvement - from the community in general, parents, and/or youth - poverty, and a lack of or run down recreational facilities. Interviewees also mentioned a lack of use of existing rec. facilities.

LACK OF INVOLVEMENT FROM COMMUNITY, PARENTS, YOUTH

POVERTY

LACK OF OR RUN-DOWN RECREATIONAL FACILITIES

Improvement Efforts + Effectiveness:

After discussing the issues noticed in their communities, I questioned them about any improvement efforts were made and how they felt about their experience. The answers I got most were volunteering, nothing, or donating.

VOLUNTEERING

Those that volunteered said participation was lacking or events required too much upfront for it to be worthwhile to them.

NOTHING

Those that did nothing were unsure of what to do or lack the time to commit.

DONATING

Those that donated felt that the process was vague overall and were unsure how their donation was used.

PLAN

Plan

KICKING OFF THE PLANNING STAGE

At this point, I felt solid in the research I had conducted, so I crafted my problem statement and 3 user mindsets in preparation for the planning phase.

HOW MIGHT WE EMPOWER INDIVIDUALS TO JOIN TOGETHER AND MAKE POSITIVE COMMUNITY IMPROVEMENTS?

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Using the data I collected through my survey and expert interviews, I determined that I would be designing my product for the following 3 user mindsets:

USER MINDSETS

ACTION TAKE-RS

Come up with ideas
Have the initiative to put them into action

BEHIND THE SCENE-RS

Not big on participating in volunteer events or planning
Would prefer to donate or contribute in other ways

HELP-RS

More than willing to help
Unsure how to contribute

Next, I sat down with my research, problem statement, and user mindsets and brainstormed some key features I wanted to implement into my solution.

KEY FEATURES

BUSINESS CARD

List skills + services of community members
Allow safe space to contract work

PACKAGED IDEAS

Pre-packaged improvement efforts
Includes everything from planning to itinerary
Link to idea blog

RIDESHARE

Allow community members to utilize each other to access transportation
Link to rideshare + carpool apps (such as Waze)

RESOURCES

Location of food pantries, unemployment services, etc
Helpful advice for common struggles
Hotlines

BULLETIN BOARD

Post community events
Post improvement efforts
Ask for help

DONATION STATION

Aggregate active donation efforts
Provide transparency + safety
Post fundraisers

Before I started sketching ideas for design, I created a user journey for each of the mindsets I created earlier to map out how their process currently operates and find opportunities to improve it using my product.

USER JOURNEYS

ACTION TAKE-RS

Come up with ideas
Have the initiative to put them into action

BEHIND THE SCENE-RS

Not big on participating in volunteer events or planning
Would prefer to donate or contribute in other ways

HELP-RS

More than willing to help
Unsure how to contribute

REFLECTIONS

At this point, I took a moment to look back at some of the decisions I had made early on in this project to make sure my goals still aligned with my users needs. Of course - there were a few that needed to be modified.

I originally planned to make this a website rather than an app, but after discussing and researching the amount of technology available to my audience, I decided to make commUNITY a mobile application due to the fact that the majority of my users do not have personal computers.

Another pivot I made from the beginning was my audience itself. In the beginning, I planned to focus mainly on those that are affected most by poverty. Through my research and discussions with those working in poverty-stricken communities, I decided I would mainly be targeting those that work in the same communities. This will make up the majority of my “Action tak-ers” and I will be relying on them to post and plan events in the hopes that they can rally those living in the community as “Help-ers” to participate in the events.

PROTOTYPE

Prototype

BUSINESS CARD

List skills + services of community members
Allow safe space to contract work

PACKAGED IDEAS

Pre-packaged improvement efforts
Includes everything from planning to itinerary
Link to idea blog

BULLETIN BOARD

Post community events
Post improvement efforts
Ask for help

WIREFRAMES

I felt that I had a solid idea of how I wanted this app to look, so I went ahead and moved on to mid-fidelity wireframes to use for a round of user testing.

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USABILITY TESTING
Themes:

Can users navigate the flows

to find what they need?

Do users think this is something

that would be utilized to help their community?

Are users able to find and utilize

this navigation element?

Crazy 8 sketches

To kick-off the design phase of this project, I started with some crazy-8 sketches to get the ideas flowing. I always find this to be the most powerful step in the process.

I ended up keeping many of the initial ideas I brainstormed using these sketches as you will be able to see as I walk you through the design process.

FEEDBACK:

I tested my prototype with users that I interviewed initially and with my classmates during class discussions. No issues with the overall app architecture came up, but there were concerns about verbiage, design direction, and readability throughout. I took these comments and iterated on them as shown below.

NAVIGATION

At this point, I hadn’t 100% nailed down navigation, but I knew I wanted it to be hidden similar to Gmail’s app navigation.

I ran through the app with my class and got some feedback that I then iterated on. This feedback influenced decisions on navigation from screen to screen within each flow, such as the verbiage used on the popups defining where each screen will take the user. This feedback also helped me to finalize the Gmail-esque overall navigation with a present call-to action in the search bar.

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MINIMAL STYLE

As I stated earlier, I wanted the events to hold the majority of the focus of the app overall so I wanted to keep the overall design of the app as minimal as possible, but through testing I found that users found it to look unfinished. Iterating on this, I made the following update, deleting the white box underneath the event image on all pages and dragging the image down:

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READABILITY

User testing brought to light some concerns about readability throughout the app. To counter this I first added drop shadows and made adjustments to the background blur behind popups and the navigation screen... Then I scrapped the whole design system and started over!

Implementing a "dark mode" style with bold, eye-catching gradients.