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UX WORK
A few of my favorite projects
2WAY
Citizen Engagement Software for Small Governments
A classmate and I participated in the 2020 SCALE SD design competition with over 200 professionals and took second place. We discovered a need for small local governments to more easily and intuitively manage their reports, track data, and communicate internally and externally. We are developing a new, all in one, CRM tool for small cities to easily integrate and quickly learn!
User Research • User Testing • Gamification • Prototyping • UX Flows
Time: 10 week class (DSGN 160)
Team: Julian Chelsey, Anthony Morrell, Brian Han, John Kim
INTRODUCTION
Large cities find themselves lagging behind when it comes to implementing, updating, or innovating on the technologies they use. My three teammates and I had the privilege of getting weekly feedback from industry professionals and specialists regarding city data management, CRM software development, and municipal service workflow management so that we could redesign an existing mobile app called Get It Done SD.Â
Get It Done SD is an app and service that the City of San Diego pays for, hoping that it will connect citizens with resources they need to report problems, such as potholes and graffiti, and ensure that their report will make it to the appropriate city department.
THE CHALLENGE
Around our 7th week, we narrowed down a key set of issues and challenges. Get It Done needed a brand new culture, interactivity and gamification within the interface, and a way of managing user expectations.Â
How might we create a new culture around Get It Done that promotes and recommends methods of problem solving to the community, while helping to manage expectations around what the city is capable of?
EARLY STORYBOARDS
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INITIAL FEEDBACK
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We ultimately decided that redesigning Get It Done was in our best interest and that the original developers of the app could be interested in implementing some of our ideas. We began to collect feedback and do research on the existing shortcomings of the app.
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Below you will see various stages of our ideation process, which resulted from multiple rounds of expert feedback that we received from members of Sandag, Fehr & Peers, and mentors from the UCSD Design Lab.
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Major Insights about Get It Done:
The city’s finite resources are not prepared for Get It Done to continue scaling.
The app is lacking as a civic engagement tool and could provide more opportunities for volunteer work/civil engagement, rather than just complaints.
Users need improved guidelines for what should and shouldn’t be reported with clear recommendations on how to do so safely.
It currently only encourages complaining.
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STAKE HOLDERS
This feedback helped us develop a "stakeholder diagram," which outlines the give and take of all parties involved. Below you can see how we envisioned the Get It Done application impacting its different stakeholders in a best case scenario for our redesign.
User Testing (User/Citizen Perspective)
Our team recorded notes while having participants (n=12) attempt to accomplish assigned tasks within the original Get It Done app, followed by low fidelity prototypes that we assisted them through.
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Tasks:
Explore the app and give us any general feedback into what you expect to see or would hope to see.
Imagine you saw a pothole at the intersection of Golden Haven Dr and Judicial Drive, what would you do?
Hidden test: We were looking to see how many people would check to see if a problem had already been reported.​
Find out all the information you can about any report you're interested in and speak out loud about what you're thinking.
Find out how bad a pothole needs to be to meet city standards for repair.
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Major Insights:
It doesn't occur to users that it is their job to see if a problem was reported already and reduce duplicate submissions.
Users feel very disengaged with the app outside of reporting their specific problem. Users felt no reason to explore other issues.
Users who did find the city standards for repair (10% of subjects) did so by using Google after failing to find it on the app.
Users felt generally negative toward the aesthetic and the purpose of the app.
Majority of users (70% of subjects) felt like their issues would never actually be resolved or someone else would take care of it.
Redesign: Medium Fidelity Screens and New User Flows
The solution we prototyped altered the app in order to make it function as a civic engagement tool for the diverse population within San Diego, while improving the user experience for existing users. Through UX writing, gamification, and popular UI practices, we made the improved user experience below.
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Problem: Users were not required to create accounts, minimizing user interactions and damaging the opportunity to build a sense of community.
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Redesign: Users are now greeted and presented with the goals of the app, creating a culture around more than just complaining. Likewise, this immediate greeting encourages account creation that establishes a photo and username.
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View the Figma Prototype here.
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Homepage
Problem: The main function of the existing Get It Done app is to "complain" about issues. However, these issues often become backlogged in different departments and aren't addressed for months.
Redesign: Our homepage completely overhauls the existing user flow. A brand new card layout clearly categorizes the new kinds of listings, showing volunteer opportunities and discussion forums among the existing problem reports. These two category additions directly address the cities inability to complete reports by creating a format for issues to be solved by the community itself.
Problem Reporting
Problem: The existing Get It Done has a major problem with duplicate problem reports that spam the back-end and makes the data hard to organize.
Redesign: Our redesign places the map feature within the problem reporting user flow so that it cannot be missed. Users always had the ability to find the location of their problem before filling out a report and seeing whether or not it had been submitted already, but the map was outside of the reporting flow and was easily missed.
Work Feedback
Problem: Users have no way of leaving feedback on work that has been completed. The city also admittedly does not have the best infrastructure surrounding following up with contractors and discussing quality of work.
Redesign: This redesign would track the history of completed reports, allowing users to submit any kind of comment they would like, making the comment publicly viewable in order to possibly start discussions around poorly done work.
SCALE SD COMPETITION
Smart Cities Accelerator
Mid way through our experience redesigning this app, we entered a competition hosted by SCALE SD. It was here that our project received some of its most valuable criticism and ending up becoming something that the original developers of Get It Done wanted to collaborate with us on. Through this process, we also pivoted our idea away from a Get It Done redesign and are now developing our own product.. We are competing in the Urban Innovation Challenge because we identified a pressing need for citizens and cities to have an improved method of communication, especially for their municipal services. During our research phase, we found that current customer relationship systems and workflow management systems are overly complex, expensive, and unintuitive. Therefore, we are focusing on improving the start-to-end workflow by streamlining internal processes and improving information hierarchy. The market research has isolated smaller cities (under 400k pop.) as the appropriate market for the software we are developing as we continue to engage with contacts in several target cities.
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We are currently one of two teams left in the competition and are approaching the finals next month.
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