Walk score index utilizes big data to have street evaluation, it is an academic urban planning concept normally used for real estate companies to choose ideal neighborhoods for development. In 2020, Urban Plus got the investment from the local government for the idea to build an application Go Street that could take advantage of walk score to encourage residents’ outdoor walking so that it could help breathe new life into streets.
Go Steet is an explorationary walking navigation tool. It digitalizes the ecosystem for everything happening on streets and helps users to plan for a pleasant walking experience.
I led the design team in desk research, user research and deciding the overall design strategy, building up the design system and executing on product design.
All team members are designers with urban planning/architecture background, they are quite familiar with how do walk score index works from a urban planning perspective, but How to transition the academic urban planning concept to build a humanized walkable city?
What we are trying to build is a new piece of software from bottom up. We want to build a tool that could improve our walking experience so that we can get more engaged with our neighborhood. We came to this with academic theory, a lot of legacy research, as well as stakeholder opinion and market awareness Go street had in the market space. There was research that was done prior and we as product designers want to conduct our research as well.
I split the team into two to start with literature review, one team is focusing on reading previous research, looking for key insights and critiquing evidence (e.g. how similar to our user and use cases?). The other team is focusing on competitive analysis in which they look through multiple different Apps, synthesizing data in analysis. This exercise helped the team to collect more evidence in less time by citing previous research. Then we did a workshop in Miro, sharing key findings of each team, trying to make sense of the entire domain.
We also take stakeholder sessions, technical meetings into one Miro board to understand where our marketing place is and the technical constraints. Finally the collaborative work turns into a huge mind map. The map helps the Product Manager to see where everyone sees the domain as a broad application. Meanwhile, It is also a trust building exercise for cross-team members, getting research in one place not duplicating work PM/designers, as well as pulling information from the audience and sharing what we’ve learned so that we are in agreement with the product positioning.
What I’m trying to do is to share with the designers about what was learned and surface for what is important. So we get clear about what is already in the previous research and what needs to be revisited. There is a lot on Zero stage, our goal is to let everyone know what was done before and how to move forward.
3 top insights of what we’ve learned in the research (diagram credit to Canopy Air Studio students):
Based on the market research, we’ve decided to focus on walking and running which takes 60% of citizen’s activity types. Plus stakeholders’ inputs, we categorized the users into three types based on their walking goal: looking for health (workout), sightseeing (attractions) and for leisure (fun). The team got splitted into three to be focused on different types of target users. Each team interviewed 12 users covering from ages 18-60 and all genders to learn about their goal, what they are trying to do and what are their current pain points.
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Teams come back to synthesize their research with a matrix for cross-case analysis, clear up notes and organize them into logical topics. The exercise gets us clear demographic information, keeps visually and verbally clear for each team and form individual to population by organizing evidence across users, test hypotheses and see top issues across users.
Each team also figured out their target user journey based on their research. Each team also figured out their target user journey based on their research.
After talking with stakeholders, we decided to focus on the target user who are walking for leisure (fun) for MVP. From the journey map, we prioritized the top pain points we’d like to solve in MVP and also integrate for the business model from stakeholders.
To convey our design strategies and how it provides value to our users as well as our business, I drew the storyboard to bridge all team members and align everyone on the same page. The storyboard tells an end to end story about how did we take advantage of walk score index and apply it to improve people’s street walking experience, integrating users’ pain points with our business goal, representing our strategy about how to form the circle from recommendation to consumption, help businesses to attract users from the sharing experience and get residents to be more engaged with streets.
The storyboard helped the team to understand a bigger picture of the project, and also works well for me to figure out the information architecture quickly. We categorized the first version of information architecture in four sections.
We all understand that it is important to attract users at this stage, so how to convey our value became the priority of our product. The first try is to represent the result of the walk score index algorithm to our user at the first glance and all flow starts from there.
This is a test driven development which helps for especially new domains because we have very specific hypotheses with the new domain about certain user behavior we don’t know. To see how our assumptions are validated, we did both micro and macro user testings zooming in and out that focused on different levels of details. We did testing with 17 target users, surprisingly, users are not quite into the road score, what they are more interested in is what is happening around the neighborhood which is the trigger for them to use our product. Another insight from the testing is female are more interested in street exploration, which has changed our target user proportion.
Then We did quick adjustments for the information architecture, integrate more with the finger gesture interaction and did another testing with 7 users. This time the design was widely accepted by the users, they also expressed their interest in the visual elements we are representing in this version of the design.
At the same time of user experience design iterations, I also did rounds of visual brainstorming and testing with users and finally chose and iterated the one that is preferred by most users.
The ecosystem is live, whenever there is anything posted for the last half hour on a certain POI (Location), the icon of the location is getting bigger and into bubbles to indicate there is something happening. Users can also check for active users for the past 30 min. This design can also be further explored to sell to businesses who are willing to be partnered with Go Street.
Other than the shortest route, Go Street is taking the walking experience into consideration by recommending the most pleasant route according to our algorithm. Users have enough flexibility during walking navigation to change mind or add other places in their journey at any time without disturbing their footprint recording.
Users can post their experience and recommendations to the local community to record their footprint as well as helping others for reliable recommendations. The final goal is to foster the prosperity of the local economy and encourage interactions between residents.
We are in the development process of this project for now and the initial MVP General release is scheduled for Dec. 2021. Thanks to Canopy Air Studio Students for their contribution on the research part and thanks for the Urban Plus team who helped with usability testing. Although there are some challenges for communicating with stakeholders and don’t have a clear role for Product Manager, we managed to get the work done and push to make progress for product development. I’ve also practiced a lot for leadership skills. It is challenging to lead a team of 12 designers, but at the same time, glad to collaborate with all those talented young professionals.
Please stay tuned for any updates if you are interested!
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