In the summer of the pandemic, one of my neighbours left a piece of paper on our doorstep telling us they were having a baby shower, so that we wouldn’t call the police on them for having a gathering in a pandemic. The problem was that we almost threw out the paper because we thought it was a promotional flyer.
I realized that communicating information to your whole neighbourhood is difficult, especially during a pandemic, since we’re more disconnected than ever.
I talked with people who live in a neighbourhood in order to gather insight on what kinds of specific problems they have personally experienced in regards to communicating with their neighbours.
Some key takeaways from these interviews were:
These conversations were eye-opening, and I decided that the proper solution would be a strictly messaging-based app for people to easily communicate with their neighbours.
The focus was now on designing a solely messaging-based neighbourhood app. My plan was to create a simple design that had the typical look and feel of other messaging apps, so it would fit the mental model of a messaging app. After creating some sketches of the app’s wireframes, I conducted a brief user test to see if I was on the right track.
The initial sketches proved to be very intuitive. The user understood that clicking the neighbourhood heading would open the neighbourhood's information. They understood the contents of the hamburger menu, and that the envelope icon was used to message a neighbour. They also correctly assumed that tapping a user's name would open that user's profile.
The majority of the app design fit the users' mental model of a messaging app, making it intuitive and easy to use. I felt comfortable going ahead with the wireframes.
Before finishing my complete medium fidelity wireframes, I wanted to see if there were any pain points with the homepage before taking the app any further. I tested with a user who has very little experience using apps to learn how intuitive my ideas truly were.
From this test, I learned some smaller features that needed to be added. But my main takeaway was that the process of starting a new chat needed to be much more intuitive.
Taking the insights I learned from the brief homepage usability test, I created a medium fidelity prototype in Figma and conducted another usability test with two users.
This test proved that the app was already quite intuitive, especially for primary functions such as opening a chat, messaging a neighbour, and favouriting a discussion topic.
Another positive change was that users now understood the difference between Neighbourhood and Personal chats, thanks to the improved wording.
However, there were still some pain points that needed to be remedied:
