Objective:

To conduct discovery, synthesis, come up with a content strategy, and design an MVP of a mobile application.
The application’s primary function is to help its users adjust to and explore a city they recently moved to. The name of the application is “Local”.

Timeline:

I had an 8-week design sprint to complete the work on this project. 

Synthesis:

After the research was complete, the next step was arranging the findings and synthesizing the data. Using Miro, I created an affinity diagram in order to categorize user feedback by theme. This was useful because it helped me gain a sense of what the user problems and opportunities to innovate.

Journey mapping:

Taking advantage of the fact that I recently made a move to a new city, I decided to use my own experience to gain a better understanding of what the user behaviors and gain insight into what the features/ offerings should be.

What I did was plan a short list of activities I wanted to do. The list consisted of going to a nearby park, then to Target, then to the local farmers market, by foot. I arranged them by destination, then by proximity to myself, then by proximity to each other.

I went about the activities as I usually would, and simply took note of my behaviors along the way. I then created a journey map from that experience. At this stage I was ready to start exploring ideas of what the app’s feature set should be.

Feature: My places:

“My Places” gives users the ability to bookmark establishments, saving them as one of “My Places”

Marking establishments as one of your places makes one eligible for additional discounts. Additionally, the more you frequent one of “My Places” the better discounts you can receive. Users are only allotted 10 slots to save “My Places”, so they must reserve them for the palaces they really enjoy visiting. 

Removing a venue from “My places” will subsequently result in the user losing their discounts from that establishment. If a user were to re-add an establishment, base-level discounts will be restored, but advanced discounts will be lost.

Hypothesis: Gamifying exploring, and frequenting establishments will incentivize exploration, engaging users to visit local businesses, and help users establish a sense of where “My Places” are.

Feature: Go

“Go” is the app’s core navigation feature. Go prompts the user to choose a destination, whether that be from search, a quick access control, or from a user generated list.

Hypothesis: users will appreciate having the ability to explore in the way that makes sense for them. By creating multiple ways to launch navigation gives the user the freedom to choose how they would like to use the feature.

Feature: My Offers

“My Offers” gives the user a list of advertisements that are aligned with their pre-selected preferences.

Hypothesis: Offers will entice users to explore and patronize affiliate businesses. Additionally, this will be a way for the business to collect add revenue.

Feature: What’s Happening

What’s happening” provides a short glanceable list of what activities or events are happening near you.

Hypothesis: Users want to know what is going on around them. They will engage with features that give them contextual recommendations about upcoming or ongoing events and activities.

Feature: Create Preferences

Contextual recommendations are a core theme of the application. By giving users the ability to select their preferences, it helps the application make provide the most meaningful and contextual preferences to the user.

Hypothesis: Users want the most meaningful recommendations for them and are more likely to engage in activities that they have a pre-existing preference for.

Feature: User generated stories & Content

User generated stories give users the ability to share their experiences with other users and gives users another way to discover activities near them by viewing other user’s first-hand experiences.

Hypothesis: Users prefer word-of-mouth recommendations. Some users may be more enticed by this type of recommendation over recommendations provided by an algorithm.

Feature: My Lists

My Lists enables the user to create list which helps them plan, and organize, and store their activities within the app.

Hypothesis: users want the ability to plan their activities and save certain activities for later.

Feature: On-boarding

On-boarding gives the user an overview of the services provided within the application.

Hypothesis:  Creating vibrant and delightful visual aids (illustrations) will set the tone for the end user experience. The prompts will hopefully engage and inform the user to join the platform.