My journey designing Townee

TOWNEE, A SMART PHONE app concept designed to encourage civic engagement, is the culmination of four months of work. This work was completed in conjunction with the Coursera course “Interaction Design Capstone Project” which is the final course of the Interaction Design Certificate program (created by UC San Diego).

This project began first with the consideration of three design briefs: Time, Change, and Glance. I decided to create an app centered around the brief, “Change”. Specifically, create an app that would encourage people get involved in political and civic issues on a local level there by creating positive change to their local environment. My motivation for this was my own personal experience of trying to stay informed about town policies and initiatives in the small New England town where I live.

The problem that I hope this app addresses is; although local governments provide abundant information about what their town or city is up to (e.g., posting meeting agendas or planning documents), it’s very hard for an individual to stay on top of those issues and to observe what sort of action and REACTION is occurring. The central idea of Townee is to give users an easy way to stay informed about the issues in their town and what sort of engagement is occurring around those issues. It is my hope that by giving the user easier, more immediate access to this information that they are more likely to be involved in their local government.

The “Point of View” of Townee, the reason I think the app is a good idea, is this: “Civic government works best when the most citizens possible participate. Let’s find a way that inspires more citizens of towns to get involved with local government.”

Here is a storyboard from the development process that details an aspect of the problem I hope Townee will solve.

Below is the first concepting prototype for Townee.

Early prototypes of the app showed a home screen that provided two ways to access the app, one as a guest, the second as a “member”. I realize through early testing that this approach was too complex and muddied the app’s concept somewhat. There really didn’t seem to be a reason for the user to use the app as a guest. I decided to limit use to people who signed up and went through the set up procedure.

Below on the left is an early version the paper prototype home screen (notice the two ways to access the site) and on the left the wire frame screen of a generic page.

A crucial realization that I had mid-way through development was that the home page of the app, the page that first appears when the user launches the app (after he or she has signed up), should give the user the most critical information, there shouldn’t any extra fishing around for the first bit of information.

The page below shows an early design of the home page that still has the user needing to make a selection to get to relevant information.

The next screen below shows the redesign of the home page with relevant information already present. The user now gets a snap shot of the top 5 issues that are occurring in their town. This was the version that was used in the first live testing of the app.

My core idea for Townee is all present here, though not fully realized yet. Besides having the snap shot of the top 5 issues in town, the user can also now access the Forums, Alerts, and News areas to dig deeper into the issues that are important to them. The user defines what issues they want Alerts and News about in there profile page.

The initial testing of app revealed several significant design flaws. One flaw, was users couldn’t really figure out how to get information about the town (e.g., the population). Another flaw, was they were confused by the term “Top 5 Topics”.

Below is the redesigned home page that attempts to rectify those flaws.

Here are three additional pages of the app showing various points from which the viewer can gain information. From left to right: Issues detail page, the initial Alerts page, and the initial town Overview page.

This project turned out to be much more complex than I had antipated. Though I think there is good kernal of an app here, there would need to be a tremendous amount of work done to fully realize the potential of this project. That said, it would be really exciting of some form of this app could have a life in the real world.