Research For/By Design: Part IV

For this weeks group project, our team has created a prototype of our favorite idea. Our goal was to make design a service that ‘finds a solution to safely and easily help your local homeless population’.

With this problem statements we’ve restated our primary persona’s key pain points:

• Does not have time to help and donate to the homeless community because of their busy schedule
• Personally knows people who struggle with homelessness
• Is fearful of approaching the homeless population due to safety concerns
• Doesn’t carry cash all the time

Based on these key pain points, we’ve set three key principles [Create empathy, Ensure safety, Provide efficiency] to address our approach to solving these needs.

Based on these solutions we started ideating on an app that uses nearby matching feature to help donating local homeless individuals.

Before we started prototyping for our idea, we’ve thought about key user flow from the primary persona’s perspective. Drawing out key screens to make the main idea of the app come across.

Then we thought about images, logo, color scheme and fonts for our app. We’ve used an image of a homeless women who seem positive and has hope to convey the positive outcome of helping local people. The Red color scheme was use to communicate help and sense of urgency towards the topic of homelessness. But using a more rounded and friendly font called ‘Poppins’ to create approachable and welcoming brand. They we’ve create these prototype using collaborative interface tool called ‘Figma’.

Our prototypes sequence goes like this. When our primary persona, Carla, is waiting for her commute bus at a busy street of San Francisco. She spots a homeless women nearby opens the ‘homie out’ app. The app shows nearby homeless individual on a map view. Carla finds Ashley’s profile and read about her background stories. Carla learns that Ashley is working towards saving towards a beauty school to become a hair stylist. Carla decides to help Ashely out by sending some funds. The app allows to enter any amount that she wants or to choose from pre-populated amount. After Ashely sends her fund, it shows how much Ashley’s goal has been met so far and a way to share the info on social media. When we are creating the donate flow, these are some detail practices we’ve considered:

• Easy to find “Start helping” call to action
• Call to actions should be clear and placed in a visible area
• Pre-select and provide donation amounts
• Remove other distractions
• Show the results of how your help is working towards the goal

We wanted to make donation process as easy as possible and acknowledge donator’s contribution for encouragement.

After finishing the prototype, we’ve thought about what are some of the questions we would like to ask for evaluation:

• What approach does everyone think would be the best? The way it is currently designed or the QR scan interaction we initially thought off
• By not being able to see the homeless individual, would this cause a decrease or increase in conversation from the donator’s perspective?
• From a scale from 1–5, do you trust to use this application themselves? 1 would be absolute not and 5 being most definitely.
• From a scale from 1–5, how confident do people see this app solving Carla’s problem? 1 would be absolute not and 5 being most definitely.
• Are there any additional features that you think we should include in our app?

For next steps, it would be good to look at few different scenarios/interaction for how the user is getting matched with the nearby homeless, different browsing methods for funds, and a potential web-based service.