responsive and local
duration:
Aug. 27 - Oct. 10
group members:
Alicia Zhang
Brigitte Gurrola
Isabella Pino
Will Kaufman
context
Technology not only drives global communication across vast distances and contexts, but is also vital to the sustainment of community resources and the interaction among people that live in a specific geographic context. While some technological tools can effectively be used across multiple contexts and cultures, there are a wide range of social challenges that require more customized efforts to meet local challenges. In the past decade, community informatics has emerged as an interdisciplinary field that is focused on solving local problems through the use of information communication technologies (ICTs). This field represents an area of applied investigation and practice that requires the designer to have knowledge of local issues, stakeholders, and unique characteristics of technology use across a particular geographic context.
goal
In this project, your goal is to create a responsive web experience that creates, extends, or otherwise builds on grassroots efforts in a local community context. This outcome should be framed within the digital civics approach, empowering local citizens to address local issues, and/or become more awareness of community events or initiatives. You will engage in research to identify existing local community and technology resources that might impact how you build and sustain involvement in the local community. This knowledge will guide the creation of a web experience that addresses a specific community issue.
process
narrowing our focus
Before the project began, we narrowed our focus to a specific topic: food. This topic is incredibly broad so we made an effort to quickly be decisive and tighten our focus early on.
After assessing our options, we opted to continue our research with a heavy focus on food deserts, specifically in West Lafayette and Lafayette, as we believed this was an interesting and semi-untapped area in which there was room for an elevated user experience.
User group
At the beginning, we wanted the primary users of our solution to be locals in the community that were willing to help those suffering from food deserts — and ultimately access to fresh food.
We pivoted this user group as we felt students would better fit our demographic for these topics. Thus, our user group became students at Purdue University that lived off-campus and had access to a kitchen to cook and prepare meals.
research
Through primary and secondary research, we aimed to get a better grasp of food problems that the community in West Lafayette or Lafayette faced. Through our six methods, we wanted to cover a wide span of information, everything from personal opinions regarding food access and looking at data regarding food deserts. For this reason, we researched and chose six methods through group conversation that would ultimately help us better inform our design.
secondary research
co-design workshop
website audit
directed storytelling
cognitive mapping
interviewing
final scope
After conducting secondary research on food deserts, conducting primary research through in-person and phone interviews, and conducting a co-design workshop with our stakeholders, we decided on a final focus. This focus was heavily inspired by our “Mapping Your Route” co-design activity from Project 2: Designing with People, in which we discovered that some students do not have personal transportation and thus must take the bus and other public forms of transportation.
How can we advocate for the students who do not have access to personal transportation such as a car?
User Story
Veronica does not have personal transportation on campus and needs a quick way to gather her ingredients to prepare meals for the week without spending two hours riding the 4B bus, given her limited availability as a college student.
Digital Civics — How will these users be advocated for, and how will they feel empowered?
Given our user group’s limited time schedule as students, we wanted to create a solution to help these students discover ways to shop for ingredients and transport themselves in a timely fashion.
creating initial design
To start off our initial design to try and solve this problem, we created some wireframes of different functionalities that we wanted to include.
We wanted to make the questions asked quick and not too difficult.
first iteration of design
Our first iteration of our design was just a copy of our wireframes.
We used HTML and CSS and the framework Bootstrap to build our site.
second iteration of design
After presenting our progress to the class, we noticed one distinct problem: where was the digital civics?
Our solution seemed very generic, not unique, and did not incorporate as much of a digital civics approach than expected.
Digital civics additions:
- Users can submit recipes they find to be “student friendly” (easy and quick to cook, being a busy student)
- For each recipe, users can view potential transportation options and their time estimate.
- Decreased the amount of questions to make our solution more specific for our target audience.
second iteration testing
Through user testing, we aimed to get a better grasp of our users’ interpretation, likes, dislikes, and potential changes to our interface. We used three methods. We wanted to cover a wide span of goals, everything from personal opinion of the interface to perceived usability flaws. For this reason, we researched and chose three methods through group conversation that would ultimately reach those goals.
Teachback Testing
Goal: To better understand a user’s understanding of the interface in their first exposure. We wanted to see how new website users would interpret the interface, given little context.
Takeaways
Purpose of Site
Things to Revisit and Revise
Usability Testing
Goal: To determine if the proposed designs are intuitive and enjoyable to the user and if they ultimately accomplish the goal of providing users with recipes they can prepare.
Takeaways
Bachelorette Testing
Goal: To evaluate areas to be improved upon and changed in our iteration. We sought to understand what users liked and disliked by turning those attitudes into literature.
Takeaways
Liked
Disliked
third iteration of design
Additions to the website included:
- more context to questions
- sharing recipe button
- for each recipe, there are transportation options of different ways of getting your ingredients that you need
reflection
In this project, we were tasked with designing with our stakeholders, known as citizens, rather than users.
Through this project, we learned that advocating for the citizen is not as straightforward as it may appear. We discovered that advocating involves direct communication from the citizens — in our case, students at Purdue who live off campus and do not have access to personal transportation.
One key takeaway we all realized late in the game, was that scoping down should happen much earlier and be much more specific. At one point, our user group was simply “Purdue students who live off-campus,” but we realized that this could essentially be any student, at some point in their college career. Therefore, we needed to be more specific with our choice of user group.
Further, this scoping was aided by our co-design workshop, one of the most insightful parts of this project. In this workshop, we were able to see firsthand the struggles our citizens face when trying to prepare meals for the week, given their busy school schedule and limited access to transportation.
Given the limited time, our final website is not 100% complete and more testing is necessary to make more iterations to the website, so the citizens are pleased with the final product, and view it as something they value and could utilize within their weekly routine.