LivingSpace Case Study | Dylan Lim Dai Yu

Design an App - LivingSpace Case Study

Overview:

This a pro bono client project from General Assembly.

In the current COVID-19 situation, Cairnhill Neighborhood Committee (CNC) is looking to expand its digital outreach to residents, in order to:

Better engage the community and continue meaningful engagement regardless

of social distancing

Co-create with the community, e.g. co-design community spaces and programs
Deepen conversation and understanding of the community and issues

CNC envisions a mobile app that can engage residents, inform them of events and other circulars, and enable a continuous conversation between residents, the NC, and other GROs.

Timeline:

3 weeks

Tools:

Figma, OptimalSort, Flowmap.

Team:

Dylan Lim Dai Yu

Sean Tan

Azy Aziz

My role:

Navigational Design, User Testing, Findings Analysis/Synthesis

Understanding Client and Key stakeholders:

Before we start the project we want to understand who are our clients and key stakeholders. To understand what their roles are and what key insights they are able to provide us, we went on to research about them and held a kickoff meeting with our clients to ask relevant questions that would help us in the project later on.

Cairnhill Neighbourhood Committee:

Neighbourhood Committees (NCs) were formed to encourage active citizenry and foster stronger community bonds within private housing estates. NCs also work with various government agencies to improve the social and physical environment in their private

housing estates.

Civic.sg:

Civic.sg aims to provide a platform that is designed for community building, discussion and evolution of issues that are important to communities and as a country. Civic discourse to a higher level.

Key stakeholders:

People’s Association(PA):

A statutory board that oversees neighbourhood grassroots communities and social Organisations
Over 1,800 grassroots Organisations (GROs) and 109 Community Centers

Staff provide support to the GROs, which include the Citizens' Consultative

Committees, Community Club Management Committees, Residents' Committees

and Neighbourhood Committees

Research:

In order to understand the different stakeholders that the CNC works with and understand the existing community outreach programs that are in place. We interviewed the internal stakeholders and explored other opportunities to enhance outreach and engagements.

We went on to do desktop research, competitive and comparative analysis to understand the best practices in Singapore and globally in relation to community engagement, co-creation and civic media and what would make sense for Cairnhill Neighbourhood Committee. Some of the competitors and comparators we took into consideration are the Neighbourly app which is a New Zealand app for the community, Nextdoor app from USA for the community to get engaged and offers part-time jobs for people living in the area like babysitting etc. We also looked at simplyEunos(a Singapore Prototype app for Eunos), Outside(an app to help each other in the neighbourhood), Icondo(for condos). We looked at how they verify users, what features are available and took the key features that we felt that we must, should, could and won’t have.

We were also introduced to Pol.is which is an open-source technology for survey research that leverages on data science. With the introduction to Pol.is we also went to research on vTaiwan and Bowling Green Civic Assembly case studies to deepen our knowledge on this tool.

Finding the Problem:

We interviewed 9 users to understand the pain points, needs and priorities of the residents that CNC serves. Due to the outreach Constraints, we are unable to get actual users in Cairnhill, we expand our network to get users outside to mimic the demographic of people staying in Cairnhill, our users are leaning towards the younger demographics

age 23-39
both locals and expats
parents & Single
Staying in private residences

Key Insights

After analyzing the from User Interviews using Affinity mapping. We split the key insights into three different categories to deep dive into individual categories at the solutioning stage.

Issue Resolution:

I will go to Condo management for issues
I will go to Government agencies/MPs for bigger issues
I felt accessibility and transport is the common issue due to ongoing upgrades
I am confident in the government and they will listen to my feedback(expats)
I feel that a collective voice would have more impact

Awareness:

I would love more marketing from the NCs, CCs and PA.
I feel CC events and classes do not cater to my age group (20-40s)
I will attend CC events if it’s free/low cost.

Others:

I have no issues using Singpass to log in
I use Facebook and Instagram more
I get to explore my area more during Covid period

Problem Statement:

To keep the team focused and aligned , we created two user persona, Beatrice who is an expat mother and Patrick who is a young web developer:

1. Beatrice, a busy expat mother, wants to be more in the know about the developments in Cairnhill so that she can keep her kids busy and meet her daily needs

2. Patrick, an IT professional, wants to be more involved and engaged in the community, to be able to campaign more effectively for an improved fitness corner in the local park.

Before moving to solutions we needed to know which direction we want to head to and what should be included in our solution. We ask ourselves HMWs and use the HMW questions to do solution brainstorming with the client. With the results we group them into similar topics for example HMW ensure the solution to be sustainable, we came up with a gamification and rewards system to keep the users interested to carry on using the App.

With this new information we updated our feature prioritisation because of the timeline we had and we want to focus on those that require a low effort but high impact. We also choose those features that can fit into the community engagement model, priority on higher model of engagement.

Ideate and Development:

After going through key insights from the user interview, competitor analysis and feature prioritization. We came up with the User Flow and draft site map.

We did Tree Testing which is a research activity that helps us understand how people go about finding things. From this, we learned that people search for items in different ways, which inspired the flexible navigation we designed. Combining everything with the result from tree testing, we developed the new site map with the features we would like to focus on this project.

Sketches and Wireframe:

Each of us went on to brainstorm and sketch on how we should lay out the design, which we came together, discuss to pick the part we liked the most and combined it in the wireframing. The wireframing will give us the skeleton of the prototype we are going to work on.

Usability Testing:

How it was conducted:

3 rounds of UT with 5 testers each(15 total)
Screener question is that they need to be staying in private property to match the demographic of Cairnhill and use mobile apps
Each tester are given 4 tasks to complete

How it was analysed:

Within each task there will be subtasks for them to complete
If the testers failed a subtask and could not proceed, the main task would be considered a fail
Analysing both qualitative data and quantitative data, we will do Design iterations accordingly
Focused on subtasks that had 3 or more failures

Task 1: Sign up for a family-friendly event on the first weekend of September

Task 2: Provide feedback to Cairnhill Neighbourhood Committee

Task 3: Provide feedback to Gov agencies

Task 4: Join a group related to Artificial Intelligence

Overall Task Success Rate

Significant improvement across all tasks from UT 1 with the exception of Task 3
Task 1: Users could not see the ‘See more’ option to find more events within the month.

Task 2: Users tended to view community issues prior to providing feedback, by adding a CTA to feedback on this page, it improved success rates

Task 3: Initially thought that Users would be interested in Feedback to Government Agencies, after 3 UTs, it showed otherwise.

Task 4: After allowing for multiple ways of searching for a group, users were able to easily find the group that they were after

Task 1 : You are a parent looking to find a family friendly event to join for the weekend of 7th-13th September. Can you show me how would you complete the task?

Findings :
-Overall Task success rate improved from 20% pass rate to 80%pass
-All sub task improved to 100% success rate except 2 subtask that is 80%
-1 went to filter instead of see more to find the event.
-1 did not click the amount of pax to book a slot.

Task 2: You are a resident at Cairnhill who wants to write in to the NC about the noise level of some residents every Friday night. As you are not sure of which unit, you approach the NC to check:

-Overall task success rate improved.
-Overall subtask improved
-Changed the hierarchy of the feedback options
-Clearer way where they would go to give feedback.

Task 3: You notice there is no ramp on the pedestrian overhead bridge outside your estate and want to do something about it. Can you show me how you would write in?

-Unfortunately for task 3 all testers do not know which agency governs the overhead bridge thus the 0% pass rate
-80% would still go to feedback within the app to let the app/moderator to direct it to the relevant agency.
-Reduced the priority of this feature due to the findings from the test.

Task 4: You would like to find like minded people who are into Artificial Intelligence. Can you show me where you would go to do that?

-100% in both overall task success and subtask.
-90% felt that it was straight forward
-Used the mental model of Facebook.

Solution:

How our solutions meet user needs and client goals?

Groups + Events:

Automatically assigned to official residential group “Cairnhill Residents”
NCs can disseminate information and build

local culture!

Connect to like-minded people and find out what’s going on in the neighbourhood!

Feedback:

Convenient feedback method to NCs
Feedback tags show what issues are trending in the community
Users are able to track the status of their feedbacks.

Polls:

A voting system built on Pol.is
Helps people in the community to see what are the key concerns and know what they feel.
Voters can provide anonymous input which provides mutual understanding and perspective
Helps voters accelerate to a common consensus
Empowers and drives co-creation (Bowling Green @ Kentucky, US)

Gamification:

Features to encourage and attract users to keep on using the

core features

Redeemable Points and Badges to showcase community activeness

Singpass Login:

Verify credentials with Singpass
Provide users with the security that content posted is by real neighbours

What's Next:

Usability testing:

UT to test a new set of features and test for desirability
Testing with less tech-savvy demographic (taking into consideration of older generation in the area)

Development:

Work with software engineers to develop app
Research - Customise for other areas

Thank you for reading!

Presentation Deck

Prototype

Presentation Recording

Design an App - LivingSpace Case Study

Overview:

Timeline:

Tools:

Team:

My role:

Understanding Client and Key stakeholders:

Key stakeholders:

Research:

Finding the Problem:

Key Insights

Problem Statement:

Ideate and Development:

Sketches and Wireframe:

Usability Testing:

Solution:

How our solutions meet user needs and client goals?

Groups + Events:

Feedback:

Polls:

Gamification:

Singpass Login:

What's Next:

Usability testing:

Development:

Have any questions?
feel free to reach out to me here!

Dylan Lim Dai Yu

Contact me!

Design an App - LivingSpace Case Study

Overview:

Timeline:

Tools:

Team:

My role:

Understanding Client and Key stakeholders:

Key stakeholders:

Research:

Finding the Problem:

Key Insights

Problem Statement:

Ideate and Development:

Sketches and Wireframe:

Usability Testing:

Solution:

How our solutions meet user needs and client goals?

Groups + Events:

Feedback:

Polls:

Gamification:

Singpass Login:

What's Next:

Usability testing:

Development:

Have any questions? feel free to reach out to me here!

Have any questions?
feel free to reach out to me here!