Week 11: A Platform for Cooperative Communities
Developing and testing an app + dashboard for co-ops
Last week our team came to a consensus around our concept direction. We decided to develop a platform for co-operatives, that’s designed to help us transition to a more collaborative, community-oriented economy. The platform would enable members (which both workers and consumers) to manage their cooperative memberships, but most importantly, allow them to start discussions and make decisions collaboratively through the use of the platform. What we understood at a high level, we now needed to make sense of in screens, features, and flows.
Rapid Paper Prototyping
First we created a set of paper prototypes for 3 different user journeys and tested them with both co-op workers and consumers. The purpose of this round of feedback was to understand at a high level where there was a break in understanding, what people liked and what was missing.
Participation
“I like that it can keep track of my social and financial equity– it would be good to see impact, & also get benefits.”
Endorsements
“I love this idea–It’s beautiful and further reiterates the ‘us’ idea.”
Discussions
“You’re putting our feedback board on this app, which is great…”
Based on our testing, our 3 take-aways were:
- While functional needs currently influence their choices more, people have a powerful, inherent desire to do good.
- The platform must shift people’s mindset to the community– what ‘we’ need to be talking about, not ‘me’ or ‘them.’
- Consumers are motivated to do good if they feel like they can actually affect change without the barrier of effort.
Sketching Flows
After testing, we reviewed the feedback that we got from users and each sketched a set of low-fi flows that focusing on the features we thought were most important in accomplishing the system goals. We shared each of our sketches with each other, talking through our decisions. After this, we went back and marked the features that addressed user needs–no matter how big or small– and then identified key points of empathy. What we found was that we needed to build a language around empathy and for us, this was using words like solidarity and cooperation. So, how do we design features that facilitate those actions?
These are a few of the major conversations we had:
- Media: When and where do you see video? How do we balance a media-rich environment with one that is easy to skim/learn about quickly.
- Discovery: Is this a place for discovering new co-ops? Does discovery feel more like you’re looking at co-ops on Instagram or does it feel more like you’re finding them on Yelp? And how do people like to search: place-based vs. category?
- Design Patterns: What UI patterns are appropriate for our audience and which instill solidarity? How do we make them feel invested?
- Discussion Board: What are the different categories that can and should be discussed? How was easy should it be to post? How can we facilitate a two-way conversation that is valuable to both members and managers?
Core Capabilities
We want our users to be able to do 4 core actions:
1–Manage co-op memberships
2–Discuss with other members to affect decision-making
3–Discover new co-ops
4–Get feedback based on their involvement
Wireframing & User Journeys
In preparation for our Microsoft presentation, our team mapped out a user journey involving each of our stakeholders. We used this artifact as not only a point of discussion, but a way to tell the story of Common Ground (our system) during the presentation. Given the importance of each of these stakeholders– worker, consumer & manager– in our solution, identifying potential narratives was really important.
Based on this we spent the next 2 days developing mid-fidelity wireframes that reflected this story.
