Sunflowerapp
London council budgets have experienced severe cuts. Maintenance of public spaces has been paired back to a bare-bones service.
Concerned about personal safety, air quality, well-being and continued enjoyment of public spaces residents are organising themselves to improve their areas.
My role
Together with three other MSc students on City’s Human-computer Interaction Design course this was the main assignment for our module, Interaction Design. As a team we went through the full human-centred design process: requirements gathering, conceptual design, prototyping and evaluation.
The challenge
Following a user-centred design process – we were tasked with designing a digital content tool for a community of our choice in eight weeks. We decided to focus community residents and gardeners in London.
Diagram produced by the Digital Curation Center – http://www.dcc.ac.uk/
Discovery
Due to the short time scales we were encouraged to use interviews and observation methods to learn more about about our chosen community.
As a team we decided on a semi-structured interview approach: we wanted to be able to compare data across multiple interviews and we wanted the flexibility to pursue new avenues if unanticipated information was shared. We interviewed five individuals participating in gardening and tidying events in London. We also attended a residential tree pit planting in Islington.
Insights
After coding our interview and observation data these are some of the insights we gained:
It’s about community
The biggest motivator for participants was meeting up others who live nearby and being around inspirational people.
Strong concern about local spaces
As spaces are neglected crime increases. Residents are also concerned about air quality and well-being.
Experienced gardeners or just keen
We discovered two types of participants: those who knew their gardening stuff and those who were simply keen and learning as they go along.
Painful interactions with the council
While councillors were supportive individually, residents mentioned red tape, changing staff, and real difficulty navigating the council contacts and policies – both by council staff and residents. Council cleaning contractors sometimes also remove plantings.
Is anyone out there?
Organisers weren’t sure who – if anyone – was coming to community events. It was difficult to get in touch with people.
Recording work
Groups wanted to log activities, especially before and after work. It wasn’t easy to do this or re-find their work.
Artefacts
Design artefacts at this stage of the process included personas, current user journeys.
Requirements
Next we generated a set of initial requirements. We used two frameworks to structure our requirements. First we used the Volere framework to consider a range of requirements: functional, data, environmental, usability and user experience. To help us prioritise requirements we used the MOSCOW framework – must, should, could, and wouldn’t it be nice if…
Some of our initial requirements included:
- The product can identify where a user is located right now and show gardening activities nearby so that users can see which pieces of land are already being looked after and which ones can be cultivated.
- The product can store and access a record for each piece of cultivated land with records including photos, descriptions, locations with timestamps. With this users can track what they’ve done, see change, and inspire other users.
- The product offers a rewarding record of gardening successes and results that encourages and inspires the gardener and others.
- The product can not be vandalised. If it were to be destroyed no-one could use it.
- Users can easily control privacy of their personal information so they can decide how to share their activities.
Design
Storyboards
Moving back and forth between design ideas and requirements we expanded our list of requirements and considered a number of possible product ideas. To flesh out our ideas and evaluate competing ideas we produced several storyboards.
Wireframing and prototyping
We decided on a smartphone app due to device ubiquity and GPS and camera features that enable sharing. We used the product requirements to shape the development of our prototype. Our application went through more than a dozen iterations considering different user scenarios and tasks.
Our team used Balsamiq Mockups to iteratively design the app. These are early screens detailing how a user could explore activities associated with a neighbourhood group.
Evaluation
Next we carried out a small scale evaluation with a residents group in London. We created several scenarios for participants to go through using an on-screen version of the wireframes. We recorded the evaluations and asked participants to think aloud while trying to use the app. We modified the SUS questionnaire to align it with our product and presented this to participants at the end. SUS has been proven to be a good indicator of user satisfaction with a digital product.
Findings
We made the following discoveries and improvements after testing the prototype with potential users:
- Search was missing and we addd that in!
- Users couldn’t find functionality that had been built into the app. We removed some of the content and revealed more functionality on the home screen.
- We reduced the number of steps needed to add and create content within the app.
Image credits
The first three photos were taken by Mark Neale.
The icons were from www.flaticon.com and licensed by CC 3.0 BY.
- The community icon was made by OCHA.
- The park icon made by Madebyoliver.
- The gardener, council and recording work icons were made by Freepik.
- The calendar icon was made by Appzgear.
The last three photos were taken by Wilhelm Clemm.