Week 13: Evaluative Research
Defining our Opportunity Area
Building a User flow
We broke down the key steps that could be done on the Kwilt platform. Key steps included awareness around the platform, user onboarding, initiating a project, or connecting with the neighbors and the local communities of practice. Defining what would be the motivators for the user around this flow. Extrinsic motivation includes building peer to peer networks. Intrinsic includes helping others and feel supported.
Planning the User Testing
In Test 2A we were looking at conventional and practical needs whereas in Test 2 B we were looking at the emotional and unconventional side of the platform.Our hypothesis was that this platform should have a balance of both the tests
Hence we decided to do two concepts. One which was rooted in being practical and used existing interaction patterns and visual affordances while the other one was more playful and used different visual metaphors and unconventional interaction patterns.
Creating the Conventional & Unconventional Routes
When we looked at resilient community frameworks, we found certain basic markers that enable resilient communities. Trust, effective communication, use of local knowledge and resources, and ability to self organize. These were our guiding principles to develop the features of this platform
Block Diagrams
Refining the wireframes 2A: Conventional
Effective Communication: For the dashboard, we imagined a street view of your hyperlocal neighborhood where one could effectively and quickly communicate with the neighbors. Lowering the barriers and introducing something like shout out which would just let your neighbors know that you are having some construction work going on. Or a way for community orgs to quickly communicate with the current neighborhood that they are having a recycling event and everyone can come over.
Community Bulletin: The community bulletin is a space for the members of the community to self organize and initiate through collective goal setting. The bulletin can have initiatives from just organizing a dinner party or starting weekly trash pickup
Project: Through our previous research we had found that people’s idea of a community is around a sense of belonging and when they have a shared goal. This section allows them to build out on the initiatives they had posted on the community bulletin
Planning the Evaluative Research
While we were fleshing out the features of the platform, we had some questions pop up. We wanted to understand what were the user needs and these questions were answered by our participants in our round testing.
Conducting the User Test
This testing was done in a combination of remote and in person. We used Zoom to moderate the call and Figma to show our screens. We all used the questions we had above and also asked some questions based on the conversations we were having.
Recruiting Users 2A: Conventional
- Netherlands
- Husband & Wife well integrated into the community, living in the neighborhood for 10 years
- 24 yo Self-employed, living in an apartment - India
-Self Employed, empty nester, well-integrated into the community - Australia
- 26 yo, engineer, living in an apartment, not at all connected to the community - California
-Indian Family living in California for the past 10 years.
Wise Words from our participants
- “Tie it to something very practical, A feature I can’t miss out on. Like managing laundry slots in my apartment”
- Every-time my roommates are not going to put a notice in the hallway about a party- so the shout outs will make it easier for other neighbors
- “Resources: I don’t trust google’s rating but when it comes from a person’s recommendation it adds a layer of trust (even though I might not know that person)
Synthesizing the feedback 2A: Conventional
Refining the wireframes 2B: Unconventional
Visual Metaphors: We wanted to explore visual metaphors. One thing that might be new to many is the idea of microsolidarity. Why communicate this with blobs? We really wanted to visually emphasize the ever-changing nature of communities and the flexibility that space allows us (to enter and join or to leave). We tried to find opportunities to communicate this in the profile, project finding, and neighborhood visualizations.
Interactions: We also really wanted to leverage the aspect of micro-interactions and movement. So here you see that when you are building your profile you are given a ‘blob’ that is supposed to change and become more multi-faceted over time as you gain experience and engage with the community. Then we have an interaction where instead of going through a list of projects you are put into an endless artboard, if you will, of ‘crews’ each crew is responsible for a project. You can see the blobs that comprise of people that make up a crew, in this interaction you can drag yourself to different crews and join that way, hopefully enforcing the idea of fluidity and inclusive nature of microsolidarty. In the next screen, we thought about visualizing all of the interconnections as well as the network the community is building by engaging with each other hopefully empowering one another by emphasizing the importance of network ties.
Language: One other important aspect of this iteration is the consideration of language. We really want to introduce vocabulary that is used in the micro solidarity world but without further complicating the simplicity of engaging with one another. So we use languages like nodes, connectors, and initiators and then we also try to provide learning opportunities like in the 2 right screens where the interaction is paired with a new word (congregation).
Recruiting Users 2B: Unconventional
- Netherlands
- Husband & Wife well integrated into the community, living in the neighborhood for 10 years
-16 yo living with parents - Australia
- 26 yo, engineer, living in an apartment, not at all connected to the community - USA
-Amanda’s Family
Wise Words from our participants
- “ooo! I like that it’s not just endless scrolling, it’s fun that I can play with an app that you’d think is supposed to be more serious”
- *Dad Pulls out glasses* “Mija, I can hardly see what’s on the screen, what do you want to me to look at again?”
- “I like the colors, but just the blobs [without street overview] would be confusing, the street overview makes sense to me.”
Where to next?
- Flesh Out Ecosystem (online/offline)
- Build out Visual Identity + Language + Design System
- Test Macro + Micro Interactions
- Hi-Fi Prototype → Test
