Neighborly

Facilitating community engagement and helping community members stay up-to-date, so as to increase community engagement and awareness

University of Michigan, through Coursera.com | User Experience Capstone | Winter 2020

PROBLEM

Through competitive analysis, I determined that other community apps tend to do one thing well, such as posting and tracking gatherings, showing news bulletins, or maintaining a Facebook-like social feed, but no app integrates all of the necessary components of community life together. Without the help of an app (using just face-to-face contact, phone, and email), members of the community often fall through the cracks and get left out of important gatherings or decision-making.

TASK

My decision, therefore, was to design a community app that integrates all of the most important aspects of community engagement necessary to streamline, simplify, and enhance a community member's interactions within their community.

User Needs Analysis

Community members need a system for their engagement that:

Is efficient
Is easy to use and easy to learn
Allows for check-ins with other community members to see if they need anything
Allows for keeping up relationships within the community
Helps encourage community engagement
Includes important social/governmental issues (e.g. petitions)
Has rapid information update (people check in with it at least daily)
Has an open forum for communication
Has signups, e-vites, and calendars for events (e.g. pig roast, meals for convalescing neighbors,…)
Has email integration (periodic digests, reminders, contact ability)
Does not require payment information
Does not require connection to other social media like Facebook
Does not allow advertising (e.g. people trying to sell a service)
Defines “community” narrowly – neighborhoods in which people are close enough that they likely know each other

Personas

From this initial research, I fashioned several personas, such as Chris:

Determining User Needs

Scenarios

With these personas, I was able to write a number of scenarios to aid in designing my community app. Here is one of Chris' scenarios:

Chris is a founding member of his neighborhood association, and it is his responsibility to disseminate information about upcoming community events. They are instigating a monthly poker night get-together this week, so he opens his Neighborly app, logs in as an administrator for his neighborhood, and creates a new recurring event on their page. Now, everyone in the community can view the event details and sign up for hosting or providing refreshments.

Prototyping

After some sketching and ideation came my first round of prototypes, which I created in Adobe XD. I performed micro-usability paper prototype tests with these to get a general idea of what makes sense, what doesn't make sense, and where users might get tripped up.

One task I asked participants to perform was:

Imagine that you are going on a short weekend trip, and need someone to take care of your dog. Please post a message on the Social Feed asking if anyone can watch your dog this weekend. Remember to think out loud.

Here is the sequence of screens a successful participant would have seen:

Design

The participant would have had to tap the "plus" icon on the home screen, tap "post" on the Create screen, input their message on the Post screen, and tap "Post" to be brought back to the home screen with their message displayed on top.

What I Learned

Layout and navigation issues, language and icon confusion, and more.

One important issue brought to my attention was that people had a generally negative attitude toward the home screen: it was too busy and not something any of them would use. After some further discussion, I learned that participants unanimously cared more about events and sign-ups than about the social aspects of such an app.

Heuristic Evaluation

I noticed a number of issues during my evaluation, but one of the most important was a violation of Nielsen's seventh heuristic, flexibility and efficiency of use: users couldn't create anything (e.g. a post, event, or message) from the new home page:

As you can see, I neglected to include a button to allow the creation of posts, events, and so on from the new home page.

Wireframes: Second Iteration

For this iteration, I performed a few more usability tests. This time, I used a click-through version of the prototype on my phone. Here is the sequence of screens a successful participant would have clicked through to address this prompt:

Let’s say that you just heard from your neighbor that there’s a poker tournament coming up, and she wants you to go with her. So, please RSVP for the poker tournament in July.

Wireframes: Third Iteration

With the knowledge gathered from this last round of usability tests, I made some tweaks and added some more functionality to my prototype, and ended up with the workable prototype you see below. While it is not comprehensive by any means – for example, the individual days on the home screen are not explorable, due to difficulties with Adobe XD – this interactive prototype allows users to "log in," read and post a message on the Social Feed, RSVP for a poker tournament, join the group, "Photography Rocks!," pin a notice on the community board, send a direct message, and more!

What began as a simple integration of desired community app features evolved into a fairly comprehensive redesign of the typical community app. With events at the forefront of the app, and the social feed available, but not omnipresent, this is an app that the average community member could use quickly and efficiently to peruse the goings-on in their neighborhood, create and share their own events, communicate with others, and more.