Back to homeFor my degree on User experience design we were tasked to create an application that facilitate citizens their lifes in the city. I chose to create an application intended to boost the shareable economy.
The sharing economy is a set of practices and models that through technology and community, allows individuals and companies to share access to products, services and experiences.
I designed the project from scratch of the mobile application for citizens to share, sell and exchange objects and activities.
I uncovered insights and translated concepts into features that address customer behaviors and motivations.
I created frameworks and prototypes to share the vision, design principles and content strategy.
I defined the product prioritizing customer goals. I created a project plan to drive different design phases with a specific timing.
I executed proto-personas, flows, wireframes and prototypes.
I planned and conducted several user tests and created reports to drive design iterations.
I designed and presented prototypes and concepts to gain buy-in from teachers throughout the project lifecycle.
We were tasked to design an application to facilitate life of citizens. For my project I decided to create an application that would serve citizens or communities to sell and exchange goods and services using time as currency.
I started searching the internet to find information about the shareable economy. I created a research plan and created a planning to drive the different phases of design.
I started with a benchmark of different applications involved in shareable economy and created a functionality map to compare most common features.
I created a Research plan with available resources: phone interviews, Stakeholders feedback at different exhibitions and one on one interviews. I gathered previous customer and market research from the existing mobile application to drive the planning phase and create main personas.
Based on personas, I created user stories for each representative user and statements that helped me define new functionalities.
Research material and business requirements were the guideline for the application specifications. Talking to various managers to understand different printer requirements helped me define design constraints, such as allowing content to change depending on printers’ hardware.
After the short research phase, I started stating the design principles the application should have to meet business and user goals:
Scalable: A navigation that allows escalation to new sections.
Flexible: Dynamic components that take into account content resizing.
Dynamic Layout: Reposition of components based on alignment to fit different screen sizes.
Native components usage: Meet user’s behavioral expectations, decrease development time and meet consistency across different platform guidelines.
After listing design goals, I created a table with all desired functionalities of the application. Together with stakeholders we brainstormed new functionalities to start shaping the application content. Because of time constraints, we had to cut some functionalities and leave them for future iterations or as premium functionalities:
Data interaction
I started designing with the smallest screen size (iPhone 4/Small android screens) to later scale up to bigger interfaces such as tablets. One of the biggest interaction challenges was creating affordable assets and gestures for interacting with data on a small screen.
I created a few prototypes on early stages of the project for marketing team to show to customers on different exhibitions and learn about interaction issues on data visualization.
Cards
After some design iterations I came up with designs accommodating different content for printers. The main components were cards. Cards could be used to storage different information. It would allow the modularity we needed to take out content that does not apply to different printer models. Cards allow a unified and scalable structure that suits bigger device screens as well.
One of the challenges of the application was creating affordable assets to interact with in small screens. One of the requirements was to give an overview of the consumables but have the ability to refine results through dates and hours, and get specific consumption rates for specific dates and hours as well as printers. Several ideas where explored.
I designed an application for each platform with its standards using native components. Therefore, I used a usual sidebar navigation that could grow and store new sections in the future to add more content.
After launching the application several iterations where done together with development team to refine the visual details of the application. Below some screenshots of the final design.
After launching the application we brought some customers to the site to review the application. They were tasked to open the application and identify it's use. Depending on their profile, they where interested in tracking the printer status or in viewing consumables and reports for each month. After exploring the application they where tasked to rate it's ease of use on a 5-point likert scale, being 1 not usable and 5 rewarding. Average rating was 5 (rewarding).