Urban Tact is a mobile and tablet application oriented toward volunteers and communities wishing to participate in Tactical Urbanism projects.
User Research, UX Design, Information Architecture, User Testing, UI & Visual Design, Prepare Figma Files for Dev Handoff
Understand & Define
Research
Synthesize
Iterate
Prototype
Test
Figma, FigJam, Zoom, Google Forms
2 Weeks
Tactical Urbanism refers to a city, organizational, and/or citizen-led approach to neighborhood building using short-term, low-cost, and scalable interventions to catalyze long-term change. The goals of tactical urbanism projects are to improve street safety, revitalize public spaces, and bring communities together. Or to change the design of your neighborhood, generally without permission. For examples or further information regarding tactical urbanism, please see the following:
Video Essay Covering Tactical Urbanism and Consultant Group, Street Plans
Street Plans Project Example (Case Study)
We set out to build a mobile and tablet experience to help volunteers of varying backgrounds discover such opportunities and to eliminate pain points common to the processes of discovering relevant opportunities, understanding roles and responsibilities, and sharing feedback as to how well the project proceeded and ultimately how the stakeholders feel about the project’s effects and completion. All servicing the hope that more communities will be able to jumpstart Tactical Urbanism projects should they desire to do so.
It is always a relief to learn that, at the start of a new project, my team and I are so fortuitous as to be on precisely the same page as one another. So - In what way were we on the same page?
Well.
None of us had heard of the term ‘Tactical Urbanism’ before and we all felt that the problem at hand was entirely too vague to address without ample research. Our goal at the outset was to “add value to that vague concept (referring to ‘tactical urbanism’) through an app. You’ll be relying on research, and your design knowledge to determine how that takes shape.” Right.
diverged from the wisdom of the great poet and took the road more traveled by.
Restated, we immersed ourselves in the lengthy process of conducting comparative and competitive analysis.
Our anchor in this process was Street Plans Collaborative - an urban planning and design organization with a mission oriented toward helping communities achieve more safe, inclusive, resilient and human-centered streets and public spaces. From this anchor, we also branched off to research Habitat for Humanity, Volunteer Match, Donors Choose, The Urban Activist, reSITE, and Center for the Living City.
From this research we were able to form our idea that this app may address both the need for a central hub through which communities can organize themselves as well as the needs of volunteers themselves. But to better determine what this may look like, we sought out interviewees who had experience volunteering and some interest in community-oriented projects.
We conducted 1:1 interviews and researched existing reports to narrow our broad aim of "addressing the needs of volunteers."
To accomplish this, we took a multi-pronged approach in questioning our interviewees about their experiences. We wanted to address every aspect of their experiences including, for example, if they feel disconnected from the service they performed after they've finished volunteering and if that bothers them. We also asked about the discovery and onboarding process. Put simply, we hoped that no stone would remain unturned.
The following represents some of what we heard:
Okay. Perhaps not. :(
Or perhaps, dear reader, I should let YOU decide! Glad the thought is out there anyway.👀
Nevertheless, to forge two distinct personas we organized our interview data into affinity maps along five different categories. Sources of volunteer opportunities, challenges, features, motivations, and ideas around tactical urbanism.
Through this process, we identified differing feelings in relation to these categories as well as the following primary points of difference:
To address the needs of both Sam and Ellen, our experience needs a digital application, a clear outline of job duties, filters, the ability to save opportunities, badges that indicate institutional affiliation (for example: are university credits available?), and a chat feature to coordinate with team members.
Thankfully, UX seems to free us of this CONUNDRUM. At the very least, we UX’ers can fairly answer “both”. It’s no cop out!
To determine what pages the app will NEED and further what those pages themselves will need, it was necessary that we identify the following:
After some initial ideation, sketching rounds, and a group MOSCOW to determine what features must, should, could, and won’t exist on our pages, we referred back to some of our site inspiration and considered how we may synthesize our notions as to what a volunteering platform needs with strong design solutions that already exist in the world.
For example: There are plenty of messaging apps that already exist. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel as far as a messaging interface is concerned. However, it may serve our purposes to add a job title next to a person’s name so that if you want to contact a ‘Project Supervisor’ or a ‘Design Lead’ for example, then a certain amount of friction in determining who you need to be reaching out to is eliminated.
Finally, before we began wireframing, we developed a basic design system.
We did this prior to wireframing to:
Having established our personas, the problems they face, the manner through which they prefer to address them, similar approaches to these problems, and our brand image/style guide we quickly created our lo-fi, mid-fi, and hi-fi wireframes. We were working in an intense product cycle and decided that it would be best to conduct tests after we'd reached hi-fidelity.
Our testing revealed a short list of usability issues which were addressed simply. Some involved accessibility. Others were pain points/points of confusion.
Users can:
In conversation with potential users as well as team members, we determined that Urban Tact could incorporate the following additional features in the future:
All said with a note of gratitude for my team and all participants in our research and testing.
At the end of this project, my team and I reflected on our progress, submitted our time sheets, and compiled and organized all of our documents. Together, we validated that our design goals had been met and that our users (with reference to our personas) had had their needs met.
Urban Tact was made to help volunteers of varying backgrounds discover such opportunities and to eliminate pain points common to the processes of discovering relevant opportunities, understanding roles and responsibilities, and sharing feedback as to how well the project proceeded and ultimately how the stakeholders feel about the project’s effects and completion. All servicing the hope that more communities will be able to jumpstart Tactical Urbanism projects should they desire to do so.
Using Urban Tact, Sam can actively keep an eye out for new, relevant opportunities, save and compare these opportunities, and ultimately use his skills and contribute to his community.
And Ellen can use Urban Tact to earn college credit, gain work experience, explore urban planning in a low stakes way, and find an opportunity that suits her busy schedule.
Both can emerge having contributed to their communities. And the communities themselves can leverage their own talents to improve their surroundings and the lives of everyone around them.
Thanks for reading!
