CommUnity Green - Bulk Ordering/Community Building
During my first semester senior year of college, I took a class titled "Interaction Design Studio". The premise of the class was to do a semester-long project with groups of about four classmates based around a topic of our choice on a list of social justice or community issues. Despite the long list of topics to choose from, Sustainability resonated with our team the most - more specifically in larger urban areas. After our initial processes of ideating, interviewing, researching, and building personas, we began creating our app called CommUnity Green. Spoiler alert - CommUnity Green is an app centered around developing community in large urban cities through group activities and bulk ordering. Read more below to see more details and features we included like tracking your own sustainable metrics!
Overview
As described above, we had a very vague prompt to begin with. Our class's goal was to take us through the entire journey of a product: problem statement, research, ideating, interviewing, sketching, prototyping, iterating, presenting, and all the steps between! Our group had a range of skills which made working and communicating with each other all the better throughout the project duration. Despite unfortunately coming down with a sickness half way through the project, my teammates picked me up and we communicated even if I couldn't attend in person meetings. Stay tuned for more of the process!
Before we were even allowed to consider our solution or approach to working towards increasing sustainability in urban areas, we went through the process of storyboarding and creating personas. On the left is a well-drawn storyboard of a case in which they might want to participate in sustainable actions within a city. Our group did a few more stories individually before sharing and compiling what we learned. We also created four individual personas based on quick interviews we did with friends and family. We determined our target audience to be young professionals in big cities, and discovered some needs and desires they had for a solution.
With our information gathered from our persona creating and target audience interviws, we were able to create a potential user flow. We started with a quick brainstorm (left) of use cases, similar applications, and other user stories we have seen in the sustainable application space. As a group we formulated a more cohesive idea of what a user flow might look like through this. With all this in mind, we finally began to plan our what we wanted in our app. Beginning with Onboarding, we decided to include features like a Community Bulletin Board, Group Ordering, Buy/Sell/Share Items, and Quantifying Impact. Little did we know, we were including a few features that might fall out of our scope.
Having these key functionalities in mind, our group finally starting designing! We each attempted to design individual features using other apps, design patterns, and our own imaginations for inspiration. Practicing communication, we dispalyed our work and how our wireframes would flow together - giving and receiving feedback along the way. In order to gain some outside feedback, we created a small prototype of our low fidelity wireframes to have some of our roommates and friends test out. We then used this feedback moving forward in the process as we documented it in our defect logs (see right).
Given the feedback from our user testing, we found out that we were trying to do too much. Many of our participants didn't see a need for some features, thought the app was complicated, and could not justify some interaction processes. With this harsh, yet constructive, list of insights, we moved forward into higher fidelity. We cut out our Buy/Sell/Share Items idea in order to hone in further on our community building and bulk ordering flows. We outlined an onboarding process to learn about our users' reasons for sustainability and inform us about the metrics we hoped to personalize for them. The onboarding process and bulk ordering user flows are shown below!
Heading into December our group compiled our work and created a write-up and prototype video to show to the class and submit. We presented in front of our class and were able to see so many other cool projects as well! I learned a lot about the conception stages of a product or idea, which has been really beneficial to me. Many projects I work on are incorporated with existing products or have already been tested and approved, so I found it interesting to learn about identifying a problem, researching it, and ideating solutions with a team. My favorite aspect of the project was being able to track user sustainability metrics, and I think that's something we could definitely improve in the future too! Check out my teammates' work at their links too! Kayla Wehner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayla-wehner/ Mia Friedman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mia-friedman-165070221/ Katie Wu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/-katherine-wu/
