LOCKY Charging Lockers
Homeless Resource Locator App
My Role
This project splits up into 2 phases: UX research and UI. Our team works together in the UX research phase and after that split to come up with individual solutions and designs.
My role during UX research step was to conduct Interviews, to do User testing, and to build UX deliverables. After concluding the research, I sketched out the solution, tested the usability and prototyping the final designs.
Project Overview
This project was a 6-week assignment in my UX Design Bootcamp. The purpose is a non-profit product for social good. It is an Apple mobile app whose target audience was the homeless community in San Diego.
The product was to provide free stations for homeless people to charge their devices while the affiliated digital product (mobile app) goal is to contain information that a person needs most to survive and escape the homelessness.
Our Approach
1. User testing : Defining the who, what, why
2.Building the deliverables: Customer Journey, User Flow, and Personas
3. Generate the solutions and come up with the features for the digital product
4. Wireframing
5. Testing usability
6. Finalize the product
Defining the users : who, what, why
The back story of how our team stumbles upon the problem.
The nature of this assignment was a passion project. We are allowed for the first time to make design and research decisions mirroring a real design process in businesses and we were so excited to be hand-on designing the things that we care about.
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The project was given to us as a Design for Good assignment and we get to decide on the problems we want to tackle
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Out team had countless interactions with homeless people. We worked in restaurants and we were told to kick out homeless people when they asked to charge their devices in the restaurants all the time. One of us tried to give a homeless guy food over the holiday and as she was talking to them she figured out that they would have appreciated more if she were to give them power banks instead.
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Therefore, we decided that our very first product would offer the charging places for the homeless community and we would be designing the user interface for the mobile app that affiliated with the product
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Compilation of Reddit responses posted in May/ 2022
Team members sorting interview answers to generate list of app features
Envision
Strategizing the product and brand
We did brief interviews among the San Diego homeless community to see if our service is needed. As the time given was short and with no budget each of us could only interview 1 person and later opted for the online approach. We decided to post on Reddit in a San Diego homeless community with 10k members and were able to gain 52 responses.
As we went through the responses, we had gained a lot of insights and perspectives. Some of which include the maintenance aspect, the funding, the sustainability, the public concern over homeless gatherings. We did a competitive analysis to see how other cities and foreign countries tackle these factors.
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The options we considered were renting power banks, smart benches, kiosks. At the end we decided on the solution of renovating bus benches to incorporate powered lockers with built-in outlets.
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Digital sketches of the physical product - Charging Lockers LOCKY
Created by Carla A.
Research Synthesis
Methodology: Interviews, Surveys, Online Market Research
UX deliverables : Personas, Customer Journey, Wireframes
The charging lockers which we named them LOCKY is a product that we thought of with a specific use and goal in mind. The process was not as straightforward when it comes to the main part of the project - designing the app that not only offer finding LOCKY near you but also offer other kinds of useful resources.
1. Interviews: We chose to interview homeless people because we met them everyday and there are multiple assumptions being made about them. Homeless life is no doubt extremely difficult but none of us has experienced it first-hand, we would not know their journey, experience daily unless we actually talk to them.
2. Personas: During researching process, we talked with multiple homeless people with different backgrounds, the ones that live in their cars, the ones that suffer from substance abuse, the one has multiple power banks and laptops, the ones that have jobs and can afford buying food and drinks from the stores. Each group of people would rate their needs differently and we want the app to be useful and inclusive for all of them. We worked among ourselves to sort cards into an affinity diagram and build 2 personas based on what we have agreed on.
3. User Journey : Our team decided that our UX deliverables would include user journeys (Current state) . By listing out every steps and emotions a person go through while trying to find a place to charge their phone, it was easier for us to identify the opportunities using the pain points in which the user shows their frustrations. The steps of the journey was synthesized from the interview answers.
4. Wire framing : The wireframes were built after we finalized our UX research phase and come up with the list of features we want to include. It is high-fidelity wireframes because we want the users to be able to visualize and understand the components. We wanted to evaluate the thought process of the users while navigating through the app during usability testing. The purpose was to make sure that the current path is the most efficient, if not we have to change it before we go full-on design the high-fidelity mock-ups to save time and effort.
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We created personas from the patterns we found most common in the survey and interview answers. Once we have the personas laid out, we will have a better visualization of who we are designing the app for.
User Flow and Journey Map demonstrate the low point and the high point meaning the areas of opportunity
I created the wireframes and did a usability testing on Kevin - one of my acquaintances that travels a lot. Turns out it did not have to be this complicated. I made some adjustments and started designing the high fidelity version
Usability Testing and Final Prototypes
Feedbacks were gathered after the wireframes were built. Final prototypes are then designed based upon the feedbacks.
The usability testing was carried out twice during the wireframes development and once during the high-fidelity design. The purpose was to detect possible usability problems. The team members test out each other’s designs first before we brought in the people that we know to do the test on. There are total 5 people that were brought in for the test (team members included) . They did not meet the target group but they were closest within our capability. We mainly carried out the test remotely by sending them the links to our Figma prototype. We were able to gather a lot of feedbacks on the lack of contrast in the color schemes, the confusing texts and instructions, the lack in text hierarchy and poor execution of design principles. It was quite expected because it was the first project that we worked on as a UX/UI designer but we were glad that we included them as testing users because a lot of our assumptions on where the users look and interact do not reflect on the real users.
Usability testing results on the team members' first hi-fi designs before the iterations
High fidelity Prototypes
Main feature : LOCATING PLACES
offering free/public resources
Sub features : LOCKY NEWS and LOCKY BLOGS - allowing users to update on the local crime news and write posts sharing tips and life experience
Outcomes and Lessons
If this was real-life project in which I worked for a company I would continue monitoring the performance of the app including the download number, the engagements within the blog post to see if it is necessary to still include it in the app. If there was more time and resources, our team would love to gather consumer feedbacks on people using the app in order to make necessary adjustments.