Los Angeles is a vibrant, cosmopolitan city, yet its residents often complain about traffic, walkability, and access to green space. What if there were an app to help Angelenos explore green spaces and engage with their community?
Overview
Project Type: Case study
Client: The Trust For Public Land
Platform: iOS mobile app
Team: Nelson Chan (lead researcher), Myesha Gosselin (project manager), Faris McReynolds (lead designer)
Deliverables: wireframes, hi-fi mockups, clickable prototype (video)
Tools: pen & paper, whiteboard, Xtensio, Photoshop, Sketch, Marvel
Goal
With The Trust For Public Land’s mission in mind, our goal was to design an app that empowers people to connect with their community, explore new areas of their city, and tackle some of Los Angeles’s neighborhood issues.
Who is The Trust For Public Land?
The Trust For Public Land (TPL) is a national non-profit organization that helps communities raise funds, conduct research and planning, acquire and protect land, and design and renovate parks, playgrounds, trails, and gardens.
Their mission statement: “Our mission is to create parks and protect land, ensuring healthy, livable communities for generations to come. Every park, playground, and public space we create is an open invitation to explore, wonder, discover, and play.”
Research
Why is an app helpful or relevant for TPL to create? In order to understand the user of a TPL app, we conducted a series of interviews and surveys (n=15). Here are some of our key takeaways:
It's clear that there is a need for a mobile app for Angelenos engage with their community and explore new areas of the city. Moreover, the app needs to bring the park-goer into the advocacy process by providing a platform where users can search for open space amenities, access activities, and submit and read feedback from others on their experiences. The app needs to be able to collect, synthesize, and convey this crowdsourced data in real-time.
Persona & User Flow
Ideation: Feature Prioritization and Card Sorting
Our research found many features and amenities that users would like in the app, which we listed out on a whiteboard for prioritizing features and sorting for determining our tab bar (the app's global navigation):
Sketches
Paper Prototyping: Lessons Learned
Hi-Fi Mockups
Prototype
User Testing
The team created a test plan for our clickable prototype, then conducted several user tests to determine next steps for prototype revision and development.
Next Steps
• Develop the rest of the app's features to accommodate other user flows and needs
• Further user testing of each app feature is needed before development and deployment
• Build out database of parks, open spaces, and other activities, alongside amenities and other services