Our goal was to understand and research how we as community could share resources and skills that could help one another within the community and in time of need where one's neighbours could help rather than hiring a professional who might be more expensive.
Project Overview
ToolShare
An application created to help within the community
Scope
We were a group of three people Tracy, Aws and myself. Our brief was to build an application that could be integrated in our daily lives that made our everyday tasks easier.
I took lead in getting a head start on research and interviewing our users to understand if our product idea will strike a chord for them to even use this application.
Problem
The idea was to have an application that makes you connect with your community and neighbourhood to give back and help people in need and use our skill set to make someone's day rather then them hiring professional for job that could have been taken care of.
We found that people will be interested and it's a good way to maintain contact in the community as well.
Tools
Research
User Interviews
We did five interviews to get to know our users from various age groups that gave us some great insights into how this application will benefit them.
Insights
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People really liked the idea of helping one another within their communities which would help them build trust and connection.
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It would be a great tool for people within the community to learn from one another.
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Definition and Ideation
The sorting helped in us empathizing and understanding our users, it made it easier for us to pin point their needs and wants for us to create an application that would solve just what they would want.
Insights and Needs
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Users want to be able to trust an application that would help them communicate with one another.
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Not only share tools but also knowledge of helping one another within the community for users who wouldn't have the time to get help professionally can get advice.
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That led us to creating user persona to better understand our users.
Feature Prioritization
Using the I like, I wish and What if method to hone in on the features we wanted our application to have.
Key Finds:
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The onboarding flow and sign in process has to be kept simple for users to follow.
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To have a database for the users to be able to locate their items and services around their area for e.g. on a map.
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To be able to book times for the service needed easily without any difficulties.
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We created workflows to help understand and have a thought process that we want the users to follow along and easy to use.
Wireframes
Low Fidelity Wireframes
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Keeping in mind the workflows we created sketches for us and our users to visualize the data we had gathered through our research.
Usability Testing
We conducted our usability tests with 5 different users and found quite a few different insights:
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Adding the address section when signing up and making it optional at the same time for customers to come back to it when they want to.
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Addition of the tutorial for the devices that would be borrowed for the service.
High Fidelity Prototype
ToolShare Walkthrough
Final thoughts and Future
Final Thoughts
Next Steps
This was my first group project as a UX research designer understanding ins and outs of the design process, constant iterations based on feedback and accessibility. It was a great learning curve working together as a team to make something we are all proud to be a part of.
As they say there's always something to do better:
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I would like to work on the 'borrowing tools/service' section along with integrating messaging service within the application.
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Would like to get more real deal data by getting it tested within the market.
