Smellevation
Mobile Navigation App, concept project
UI & Interaction Design | Research
Role: UX Generalist
Duration: 2 days
Tools: Google maps, Pen & Paper
Overview
The A City for All Hackathon, put on by The City of Seattle's Civic Technology Program and AARP called "data scientists, designers, urban planners, and software developers ... [to] focus on what Seattle looks like in 20 or 60 years … to conceive age-friendly civic apps, data visualizations, design proposals ... that will help the city contribute to its citizens' health, longevity, and lifestyles."
Team Pandora for Streets aimed at encouraging more people to walk in the city, asking:
How can we improve the pedestrian experience?
Solution
Recognizing that pedestrians are not isolated from their surroundings like those in vehicles, and sometimes travel time is not the only important consideration, we developed a mobile app tailored to the pedestrian experience, suggesting routing based on all senses, accessibility, and joy.
The app offers routing options based on sidewalk treatment (curb cutouts, stairs), steepness, lighting, loud noise and large crowds, allowing customization based on physical and cognitive sensitivities. A route may also be chosen based on a path past trees, flowers and fountains, views, and nature sounds. This information is sourced from multiple public databases, with a future option to include crowdsourced inputs for increased accuracy and missing senses such as smell.
My Role
As part of an interdisciplinary team of eight software developers and data scientists, I participated in ideation, interaction design, and prototyping, as well as accessibility heuristic evaluation.
Process
Researched the city landscape via walking tour.
Categorized findings by pleasurable, prefer to avoid, and accessibility.
Ideated with two other designers via sketching and brainstorming.
Prototyped the on-boarding, filters, and selection options for each experience factor.
Conducted informal usability testing on paper prototypes.
Assessed accessibility via heuristic evaluation
Presented a low-fidelity digital prototype.
Takeaways
In a hackathon-style environment, an impressive amount can be learned about users and teammates in 48 hours.
With a diverse and motivated team, it's possible to go from concept to demo very quickly.
What is essential to specific user groups can also be helpful and enjoyed by many other user types.
The fast-paced multi-disciplinary environment of a hackathon is a lot of fun!
the team
Media coverage
