Sept-Dec 2024
Isabella Joao (she/her), Michelle Huynh (she/her), Christine Duong (she/her), Jasmine Bittu (she/her), Kai Cencora-Mikutra (they/them)
UX/UI Design, User Research, Product Design
UX/UI Designer & Researcher
Helping individuals—who are seeking stronger connections or who are new to their neighbourhood find opportunities—discover their local communities, so they can build meaningful relationships and feel a sense of belonging.
Created a platform that connects people in their immediate neighbourhood to communities that are based on their common interests, local events and supporting services.
Conducted background research on how people seek new connections or strengthen existing ones in the context of a physical community.
Co-produced the research/interview questions and conducted interviews to understand the needs, goals, and context of users wanting to seek connection with their neighbours.
Collaborated on the creation of the user persona, journey maps, and affinity diagram; synthesized research into actionable insights for the platform’s design.
Co-designed low-fidelity wireframes to outline the user’s happy path, conducted usability testing and iterated the redesign based on the feedback from industry experts.
Set the direction for the team in creating a high-fidelity prototype based on the feedback received from the usability testing and industry experts.
Empathize: Conducted user interviews to understand challenges in building neighbourhood connections, resulting in the creation of a user persona and journey map.
Define: Distilled research into a vision, solidified our problem statement, and identified user pain points based on competitor research and gaps within the market.
Ideate: Developed solutions by incorporating a priority grid, created low-fidelity wireframes and conducted usability tests that outlines the user’s happy path.
Design: Created a style guide, high-fidelity UI prototype and iterated designs from industry experts and user feedback.
Help people who are new to a neighbourhood or want to feel more connected in it get to know their neighbours and surroundings so they can strengthen their community and their neighbourhood ties.
First, we established the struggles people face when interacting with their neighbourhood:
This led us to synthesize goals for our problem space: identifying ways to create or enhance opportunities for social interaction and community engagement, ultimately fostering stronger local ties and a greater sense of belonging.To address the problem space, our user interviews and background research sought to answer 3 main questions:
Our background research explored how to support the strengthening or development of new bonds inside physical neighbourhoods, in particular where digital interaction can disincentivize face-to-face contact, leading to community participation gaps. We paid attention to the drivers of connection, the challenges people experience in trying to engage with their neighbours, and the value of local connections in pursuit of mutual support and solidarity.
Gaps in community engagement and social connectedness are further exacerbated when people move to a new neighbourhood and desire to connect with others in their area but are not familiar with the area's people or the local “scene.”
A lack of popular, easy-to-access community spaces also makes it difficult to form these desired local bonds. A sense of meaning or importance that can be drawn from the local community is important for people, and they strive to connect with others to share interests, provide honest feedback on services or social structures, share or receive resources and aid in times of need, and develop mutual sources of support and solidarity through shared environmental, cultural or political experiences.
Our user research procedure was centred on a semi-structured interview format. Participants were initially contacted by text, phone call, or email, and provided with a consent form before the scheduled interview. Interviews were conducted orally, either over the phone, over Zoom, or using any other audio communication application of the participant’s choice.
Participants were required to be 20 years of age or older, willing to meet new people, and struggling with loneliness or lacking a sense of local community belonging.
Participants were recruited using convenience sampling: researchers asked people they already knew, ranging from casual friends to acquaintances. A total of 10 participants were interviewed, all between the ages of 20 and 60, living in different environments (apartment complexes, triplexes, stand-alone houses, etc.) in major cities or suburbs in Canada.
Our participants were:
After synthesizing all our user research data using affinity mapping, 4 clear themes emerged:
Community Engagement: Community events allow participants to connect with people and break social barriers. Participants mentioned that mutual support was one key to deeper connections.
Trust and Inclusion: To build up trust, it was necessary to repeatedly have positive interactions with each other. Participants felt it very important to be included and made to feel welcome by others socially.
Cultural Diversity and Support: Participants valued connecting with neighbours from diverse backgrounds. Some emphasized the importance of group family dynamics and resource-sharing for stronger ties.
Barriers to Connection: Isolation, especially post-COVID-19 pandemic, and lack of spontaneous interactions were major barriers. Additionally, language, generational gaps, and negative past experiences hindered engagement. Most interactions were superficial, highlighting a need for structured social opportunities to foster long-term connections.
We then created the persona of Mira the Mover to understand the challenges that face those who move into new neighbourhoods and struggle to connect with their community.
We also mapped the as-is user journey, to visualize the steps taken by users in getting to know their neighbourhood: the barriers, and key moments of frustration or delight in connecting with others.
Based on the research and insights from the empathize stage, we refined our problem statement to guide our design process:
→ Help individuals who are seeking stronger connections or who are new to their neighbourhood find opportunities to get to know their community so they can build meaningful local relationships and feel a sense of belonging.
With the guidance of our problem statement, we created a vision for our solution that concerned any discrepancies from platforms on the market and opportunities to address our goals:
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Nextdoor is an app that aims to link individuals in neighbourhoods together. It provides a platform for users to interact with their neighbours by sharing news, updates and seeking advice or assistance with community-related matters. However, it has been criticized for promoting misconduct, like racial discrimination and divisiveness despite attempts to regulate the content.
To start, we created a priority grid to evaluate our potential solutions for our vision, concentrating on ideas that would go the furthest in building neighbourhood connections:
Standout Ideas
Local Community Guide: This is a high-effort and high-impact idea to allow neighbours to have access to local resources, information, places, and opportunities in a centralized place that would empower users to connect more deeply with their neighbourhood.
Community Bulletin Board: This was a moderate effort, but a high-impact feature we considered to allow neighbours to see upcoming events and plan their attendance, which could help them meet new people and form connections.
Our initial wireframe sketches prioritized the creation of a design with minimal tasks to reduce cognitive overload and providing feedback anytime the user clicks on a button.
User control and freedom: Done by providing skip buttons.
Consistency: Implementing buttons that are clickable in the same colour.
After the creation of the low-fidelity wireframe sketches, we focused on demonstrating the happy path for the priority task: discovering a new community in your neighbourhood.
To arrive at this decision, we looked at the identified motivations, painpoints, and goals. These included a “sense of belonging” and “relatedness” which exhibits the need to meet others who share similar interests as e user.
We also referenced the interviews we conducted, where users spoke about even if they meet the neighbours during walks, and the conversations are very surface-level based.
Hence why we created the tasks that encompasses the need to create deeper connections.
Our user interviews revealed that users are motivated to connect with their neighbours by the desire for a sense of belonging. They value relatedness & want to meet people who share their interests.
Our interviews also showed that users want to have conversations about topics that go beyond surface-level interactions.
Based on our priority grid, this task would be a relatively high-impact but low-effort feature to allow users to initiate conversations and begin forming connections with like-minded people.
In following the happy path, the to-be user journey map and our low-fidelity prototype show the series of steps taken by users in finding their neighbourhood, communities and how they build valuable relationships over time:
We then conducted usability testing on our low-fidelity prototype and talked with industry experts to garner valuable feedback with respect to its functionality and usability. The following feedback was implemented to improve our design:
Usability Testing Feedback
Clarity: The user understood the prototype's goal to “discover and join a new community in their neighbourhood group.”
Task Completion: The user completed the task but faced an issue with the "add" button not working, so they opted to skip instead (following the happy path).
Navigation Consistency: The bottom navigation bar was inconsistent from the first screen to the others, with an unclear icon on the first screen that didn't appear on the others.
Usability: The "skip" and "next" buttons were very helpful, and the task was easy to complete due to the clear button design.
Suggestions: Incorporate search or scroll for community browsing, include standard navigation across the screens and integrate direct messaging to interact within communities.
Industry Expert Feedback
Simplify Onboarding: At the onboarding stage itself, it must be easy for users to enter their postal code when accessing the platform for the first time so that options for neighbourhoods open up immediately without causing friction. This avoids steps and superfluous processes, like re-entering interests during the joining of multiple communities.
Clear Information Architecture (IA): It needs indicative tabs and button labels to create consistent, intuitive navigation across screens. The Expert’s first impression was that tabs could be labelled "MyNeighbourhood," "My Office," and "My Parent's Location." to support multiple locations.
User Profile Setup: The user profile should be created beforehand so that when users explore an app and decide to join the communities, this can be done seamlessly.
Community Management: Explain how the communities would work; perhaps there is a moderation system in place, much like there is on Reddit.
User Flow and Jobs to Be Done: Clearly explainnd outline specific tasks for the users to undertake in terms of joining and engaging with the community.
Skip Extra Onboarding Steps: Concentrate on giving the user the possibility of going straight into the application without such a big onboarding process. This will make browsing and engaging with neighbourhoods much easier.
Our team had a similar outlook for what we wanted our platform to look like. Our style guide was developed by first creating mood boards and individual style tiles, where each of us could add in our own vision:
We then reviewed our style tiles together, combining our palettes into one unified style guide reflective of our shared design direction:
Then, we moved on to our creation of the high-fidelity prototype. From expert feedback to usability testing, we developed our high-fidelity mockups in an effort to enhance the user flow and functionality of the application. The following improvements to the happy path we implemented are depicted in the storyboard:
Iteration #1: User Verification
Iteration #2: Neighbourhood Verification
Iteration #3: Community Recommendations
Iteration #4: Community Homepage
-> Users verify their identity before joining a neighbourhood -> Based on the user's geographical location (postal code), the app generates a selection of neighbourhoods -> The user is given a list of different communities in their neighbourhood along with a curated list of like-minded users -> Once the user joins a community, they can access posts, people, events, etc.
This project has addressed the major goals, vision, motivations, and problem statement we identified in the empathize and define stages. This project laid the groundwork for building a solution that fosters stronger connections and a sense of belonging within neighbourhoods.
We got input from testers and industry experts throughout the design process. We carefully considered the best design solution and selected what we thought would be most advantageous for the users in order to hone our decision-making abilities.
The next step would be developing the full application, whereby more features will be refined and tested for a seamless, user-friendly experience that encompasses our solution. Also, our design was greatly enhanced by the insightful information our usability studies yielded. By identifying possible problems, more usability testing could help improve the product with more time and money.
