This one is my experience of designing "E-Komsu" -a web app for neighborhoods to become more communicative.
Sole contributor
User research, created personas, wireframes, flows, produced high-fidelity mockups.
6 months
In the last year of my university life, I wanted to work on a project that I can be more familiar with "the design thinking process" and worked on this project.
In my country, Turkey, neighborhoods used to be places where people socialized and discussed their daily happenings. But now this tradition seems to have disappeared in big cities. People who live in the same building, street, or neighborhood don’t even know each other, and this situation has some challenges.
First of all, to empathize with people to understand their experiences and motivations, I started the user research with contextual interviews with random 30 people of all ages between 20-75 to find out what people think about the current existence of neighborliness and the way of their living in neighborhood.
Do people have strong ties with their neighbours than before in big cities?
While some people stated that neighborhood relations in big cities are not as strong as before, some of them said that this fact depends on where they live.
Well, for them, what are the reasons for this decrease?
I divided all the answers into three groups in the fishbone diagram. (You can see it below).
Do they care about the neighborhood culture?
According to the answers given, people in their 50s or older have communication with their neighbors and they still attach great importance to the sense of neighborliness. But, 30 % of the other people I interviewed think in a more individual way like "why I have to keep in touch with people just because they're living in my apartment?", while the other 70% of them want to communicate with neighbors but don't make an effort for that.
I think we should focus on two different terms when we need to describe the current existence of neighborliness.
- Age
- Income
If we speak about income, positive changes in the socio-economic terms lead to the weakening of neighborhood culture. People with high income expect from neighbors to not share their private life. In the rush of work-life, since the house becomes a place to rest, it is unnecessary to communicate with neighbors for them while they have already family and friends.
After finished informative interviews and observations, to get these impressions out, I used personas to help me do that.
Through the analysis of my research data, to place people in different corners, and to be able to create personas according to the differences, I identified three different labels:
- Communication with neighbors
- Social life
- Local commitment
Then with the benefit of using these labels, I defined four different personas that I used to simplify the understanding of user goals, needs, limitations.
(I mainly focused on supporting the goals of primary personas, then secondary personas.)
What do I want to achive?
To set out the specific challenges I will address, I defined a clear problem statement for primary and secondary personas in a goal-oriented manner.
Using how might we technique
After I'd defined problem statements, I started asking “How Might We?” questions to make throwing all ideas out there easy.
Taking all ideas out of my mind and organize them was my first job at this stage. To achieve that, I've personally chose "mind mapping technique". First of all, I wrote down problem statements then solutions and ideas that comes to my mind.
To choose all the ideas that actually add value to the lives of the users, I've decided to use "value-added analysis technique".
Value-added analysis is a method to identify ideas to eliminate unnecessary ones and enhance the impact of the product for users. I extracted every idea in the mind map and classified them into one of three categories, namely:
Value-adding ideas
Produces value or satisfaction for the user. When determining whether or not a idea is value-adding, I asked the following questions:
- Would the user agree that this idea is neccesary to achieve their goals?
- If this idea is removed, would the user perceive that the product is less valuable?
Product value-adding ideas
For this ideas, the criteria is:
- Would the product (potentially)suffer in the long term if this idea was removed?
- Is this idea required in order to improve the product?
Non-value adding ideas
Everything else besides value-adding ideas and product value-adding ideas.
Documenting the process needed to achieve user goals and defining how execute the ideas identified through mind mapping was my goal when I started to create user flow diagrams.
I outlined the steps that the user has to take for different scenarios. And below, you can see some of all the diagrams I created.
-Please click on pictures to zoom.-
To understand and show the visual representation of the navigation features and hierarchy I created a sitemap.
After creating sitemap, I started to sketch how the content will be shown on each screen. Because of time pressure, I jumped straight from sketching to prototyping.
The project narrows users' networks to people who live in their street, not the other people living in other areas. So they must choose the street they live on.
But, as a negative point, improving the user registration process for users' security and privacy is an important thing in the project to consider for the future.
There are three pages for their social activites.
- Events
- For sale
- Recommendations
With the for sale page, users can buy or sell items but can’t take payments through the app, they can just contact the seller through messages for details like price, etc. Also for the recommendations page, there're 4 subcategories: cafe, shop, hospital, and pharmacy.
While researching Serdivan Municipality's services, I saw that there is a veterinary service for stray animals.
After notifications sent by phone, petition, or e-mail, collecting stray animals, transporting them to the rehabilitation center, neutering, and vaccinating then taking them back where they were collected is what they're doing during the process.
Using this application to connect with people would be easier for municipal employees since there would be no multiple notifications channels like e-mail, phone to follow. So I included this veterinary service into the project along with other public servants like police to connect with citizens more closely and directly.
When we lost an item or are a victim of theft and that kind of safety problems, it's important to take action quickly.
So to check and share security alerts, lost pets, and items quickly, there should be a page for these kinds of issues in the project.
When studying information systems engineering but want to switch to a design career, this project was a great opportunity for me to be able to experience the design thinking processes within six months. But because of time pressure, I didn't do usability testing from early development until the last part.
Also, it was too easy for me to get caught in the trap of focusing on “making it beautiful” without attaching importance to the actual purpose of the design. I hope I've kept a balance between both sides.
In the end, the learning process is still going on for me.