During week 4 of my journey as a UXDI apprentice, I was tasked with tackling a social responsibility project with 3 other talented ux design students. We were asked to choose a sponsor for our application and decided to go with the Golden State Warriors.
OVERVIEW
TITLE: ALLY App
GOAL: Increase awareness of real-time incidents and reporting in relevant areas
DURATION: 2 Weeks
MY ROLE: User Research/Insights, UX/UI Design, Wireframing, Interactive Prototype, Visual, Motion, and Brand Design
The Persona: Everyday Traveler
Based on our content strategy, we chose to focus on people who commute everyday and find convenience and comfort most important.
The Business: ALLY
People want to travel and have sense of security. They want to avoid dangerous situations, wasting time and resources, or dealing with delays.
Why the Warriors?
Warriors are interested in being involved in the community
They bring a lot of foot traffic to the city during games
Incidents in the city have happened during these games
Warriors carry a global fan base
RESEARCH
Content Strategy
Informed by our sponsors, the Warriors, Ally's tone of voice is informal but responsible. In contrast to existing apps that report criminal activity, Ally’s communication style emphasizes community-building and awareness of being informed and informing others.
Ally has a structured UI, particularly around the incident reporting function, which prevents bad actors from taking the app in an unwanted direction and maintains a calm and helpful communication style similar to that of our sponsors.
User Survey & Insights
Research objectives to find out:
Why users take BART
Preferences on what time users ride BART
If users have encountered anything while using BART
If users knew of/ used the BART Watch app
20 Responses
6 Interviews
After a 24 hour period, 12 people responded and the following insights were discovered after extensive reviewing:
Feelings of being unsafe, worried, sad, and anxious when incidents occur around them
Strong desire to stay informed
Overall want to know the who, what, where, when and why
Not typically involved in their communities
Unaware of how to report crimes or feel comfortable doing so
Put top priority on reporting crimes surrounding someone in need, robbery and assault
Mostly avoid people making a scene or showing aggression
Insights from Affinity Mapping:
Users feel safer depending on the time of day they are riding BART
Users prefer riding BART when there are more people around
Users feel unsafe around people making scenes or being loud
Users are unaware of how to report situations they encounter on BART
The Shift
After conducting the 1:1 interviews and analyzing the results we realized that our scope was too narrow. We decided to broaden our idea from safety concerns while on BART, to safety in general, while in transit. In response to this change, we needed more information which we obtained via a survey.
What we wanted to learn:
How users feel about incidents that occur around them
How much information users want to know about the incidents that occur around them
How aware users are of their surroundings
If users report incidents they witness
Do users know how to report an incident
12 SURVEY RESPONSES
Insights and Pain Points from survey:
A desire for knowledge
Personal safety
Safety of others
Potential to avoid situations
Unaware of options for actions
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
Since our app consists of both crime reporting and mapping features, I felt it was important to perform separate competitive analysis for both components.
Insights that later influenced our design decisions:
The ability to search is essential
Reporting templates are not a feature many of our competitors include
Important to include routing options
Our competitors find value in including a "Your History" feature
*images of our sketching process
Sketching
It was essential that we were all apart of the initial sketching process to make sure our ideas match up. It was important for us to sketch and share our ideas before moving into a digital space. By starting this process on a whiteboard it ultimately saved us time and energy.
Overall, this rough stage of sketching helped us to decide on the direction we wanted to take.
Design Decisions
Mirror Ally's interface to that of Google Maps for familiarity
Reporting button must be front and center in the design for convenience
It's essential to include a reporting template in our design
Use symbols to visually convey the severity of incidents
Paper Prototyping
We turned our initial sketches into a paper prototype, which we could carry out usability testing. We did a paper prototype method, because it’s quick, easy, cheap, and allows us to know exactly how to design the screens moving on to our wireframes.
5 users tested
3 tasks given
Tasks were done to see:
If the user could find an incident that happened nearby their current location.
If they could find the safest route home dependent on what incidents had occurred along the way.
If the user could share an incident pin with a friend via a text message.
User pull quotes:
"I feel comfortable about the layout because it was familiar.”
“Easy and straightforward.”
“Reporting was really intuitive. And the amount of options is good, it was clear.”
User insights that influenced iterations:
Make sure it's obvious that certain parts of the map are interactive
Create an on-boarding carrousel to inform users of what the incident severity icons mean
Users appreciated the familiarity of the map interface of Ally
Brand & Style Guide
It was imperative that we kept the same color palette as our sponsors. Users will automatically associate ALLY with the Golden State Warriors and will feel a sense of familiarity and comfort.
Using Gestalt design principles, I came up with a logo that incorporated a location pin icon as the letter ‘a’ in ‘ally’. The font Fredoka was the perfect sans serif for a playful look to attract both young and older audiences.
Final Designs
What we took from our user research proved invaluable. Due to the fact that we tested on a paper prototype, it was easier to incorporate what our users said into our final designs. We first made our wireframes, addressing some of the issues we encountered in our first round of testing, such as the on-boarding carousel and turning up the contrast. We didn’t test again on our wireframes, as we felt as though testing on our final designs would provide the most useful user feedback.
Conclusion
Throughout the process, we kept our designs as streamlined as possible so that we could produce the best MVP without overwhelming the user. Through and through, this project was a team effort, and we couldn’t have done it without one another. Collaboration is vital, and it’s important to not only trust the process but as well as your team.
Next Steps
After testing on our final design screens, we felt as though we produced a most viable product, but some insights to include in our next steps are:
Allow for chat within the app, so people can create groups and find people to walk with
Add a link to Ally in the app store at the end of shared incidents report generating more potential downloads
Further break down the categories of crimes and separate them into appropriate buckets