Overview
GoLocal was a design project done for the Fundamentals of User Experience Design course. The problem criteria for us to tackle was entered around the theme of the CHI Conference 2019 Student Competition, which was ‘weaving the threads within the social fabric’. Our team was excited by the idea of helping connect people with local businesses, based on the assumption that local businesses were places that foster a sense of community. We began our design journey by looking to valid this assumption and trying to uncover what leads people to supporting local businesses or not.
Key Stats
Full design project from nothing to medium-fidelity prototype
52 Survey responses analyzed
10 Interviews and usability tests
4 playback sessions involving industry professionals
Created a research paper, video and poster as a submission to CHI Conference 2019 Design Competition
Research
We used a number of research methods to explore this area.
Secondary Research: Compiled data about the need to support local businesses and what effects they have on communities
Surveys: 52 respondents to a survey focused on understanding what the sentiment people have towards local businesses.
User Interviews: Conducted 5 interviews with users about why they support local businesses or not.
From these findings we found that the primary reasons people may not support local businesses were that they were hard to find, expensive and did not have the products they wanted.
Ideation
We used a number of techniques to discuss and draw out the potential of our findings, giving us a clear understanding of the problem space.
We created an empathy map, built a persona, crafted needs statements and brainstormed ideas to tackle these problems.
We prioritized these ideas on a grid, balancing impact versus feasibility, to determine what ideas we would design for as a minimum viable product.
Prototyping
We decided to create an App that would address the issues we uncovered and built upon the ideas that we created.
Key features were based on being able to locate local businesses, highlighting their personal stories, finding deals that these businesses were offering and showcasing the menu of items that these businesses have.
We used an agile methodology when creating these mockups and prototypes, conducting usability tests to inform each successive stage of the design.
The medium-fidelity prototype was built using Figma.
