Overview
Role: UX Specialist
Industry: Services
Category: UX Design and Research
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Methodology: Modified Lean UX
Project Length: 2 months
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Team Members:
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Muhammad Bilal (Team Leader)
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Seb Gonzalez (Visual Designer)
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Connor Friden (User Researcher)
About Horizon
Horizon is a kiosk application designed to help homeless individuals find the resources they need around them. The kiosk is located in places they visit frequently like homeless shelters, public libraries, food banks, amongst others. Students struggling with homelessness can also visit their university's resource centers to use the kiosk.
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We used a process called Lean UX to create the kiosk application, which includes user researching, affinity mapping, prototyping, and user testing. As the team leader, I was responsible for ensuring we as a team took Horizon in the right direction while brainstorming solutions to some of the problems my team had along the way.
Resources that Horizon displays to its users include locations of closest shelters, food banks, locations with free showers, and facilities that have laundry days. In addition to this, Horizon also gives users the ability to find some secondary resources like a list of locations where grooming services are offered, clothing can be collected, job and resume building services are offered, as well as free medical services.
In the year 2018, there were a total of 368,324 homeless individuals on any given day in the US. However, shelters can only provide enough beds to 58% of them (192,678 individuals), leaving the other 48% (175,646) of the homeless population out on the streets without a safe place to sleep in. Building more shelters, donating more food, are all helpful. But are we making efficient use of the resources that we currently have? Well, that is where Horizon comes into play. It keeps real-time track of all the resources available at a particular location, which can be viewed from any other location where the kiosk is available.
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Horizon's Official Logo
Horizon's Affinity Map in its Early Stages.
Sprint Backlog Overview
Low-fidelity paper prototype of the home screen.
Design Process
Horizon was built using a modified version of Lean UX. Lean UX is simply a technique used to work on projects in an agile environment. The way it is different from traditional UX is because of how fast it is. There are a lot of short cycles or sprints involved, making it easy for the team to backtrack in case a bad assumption is made, saving a lot of resources including time.
We divided the time frame we had into two sprints and each sprint lasted three weeks. Let’s take a closer look at each sprint.
Sprint 1 – Week 1
Our team referred to the first week as the design week. This is where we came up with a lot of the assumptions that we had made about the state of homeless people, the problems they faced, and what we could do to help them overcome these challenges. All of us worked on these assumption sheets individually and then we sat down as a team and put all our assumptions in one.
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Using our assumption sheet, we created a problem statement. We looked into the current status of the market and explored business opportunities we could potentially use in our favor.
Our problem statements were as follows:
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The market already has a lot of apps and websites to help homeless populations
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Homeless people have limited access to smartphones and the internet.
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Literacy rates are low among the homeless population.
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Homeless people are denied entry once a shelter is full.
During the same week, we created a product backlog. Our product backlog consists of all the features we wanted to implement into the kiosk application. We prioritized the backlog based on how important these features are. All the features we included here had a set business outcome, something that can help us be a viable business on the market.
The features we wanted to include in Horizon are listed below:
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Give users the ability to find a shelter.
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Provide them with a list of medical resources available.
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Create a network of shelters that can collaborate.
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The ability for people to sign up and check-in
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Ability to view grooming services scheduled.
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Find job-related resources.
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Soon after we had a backlog drafted, we split it into two- one for each sprint. Each sprint backlog contained features we wanted to implement in that particular sprint. Here are the first four features we wanted to implement in the first sprint.
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Once we completed the documentation, we wrapped up the first week of Sprint 1 and prepared to start working on a prototype for Horizon.
Sprint 1 – Week 2
After the end of sprint one, we had a better understanding of the features we wanted to implement into the app. We started out this sprint with low-fidelity prototyping. Each team member was asked to create a prototype on their own, and then we sat down together as a team and picked the best prototype ideas for each feature. We combined them all to create a group prototype which can be seen in the figure below.
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It was very efficient working on low-fidelity prototypes, and it gave me as a designer a better idea of how to implement features in the future once we move to the high fidelity prototype. We started working on a low-medium fidelity prototype in Figma towards the end of week two and continued to work on it until the end of week 3.
Sprint 1 – Week 3
Our prototype had taken a digital shape by week 3 and we were working on the interactions and the design framework for the app.
It was time to put the prototype to the test, bringing us to the first user testing interview. The interview was conducted with a Case Manager at KSU’s CARE Center, which is a resource center for students struggling with homelessness.
While testing the prototype was a part of the interview, we wanted to also check if the assumptions we had made were accurate. We found out that our secondary proto-persona, whom we were referring to as a social worker at the time should really be called case managers. We then proceeded to test Horizon and found out that the concept itself was sensible. Our interviewee saw value in having the kiosk around, especially after hours, when staff members are not available to help students.
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KSU's CARE Center Logo
Challenges
Horizon is a very ambitious project and we were aware that making it a reality will be a difficult task. Our first challenge was setting up interviews. Homeless people are categorized as a vulnerable group and getting interviews with them was almost impossible because of privacy concerns. We did get an interview with a case manager who even though is not our primary user, was able to give us feedback from both an administrative and their client’s perspective.
The next challenge we faced was keeping track of documents. All team members were moving at a very fast pace and being able to have access to documents we had been working on quickly was crucial. We overcame this problem by switching to a more intuitive and easy-to-use platform, creating a separate channel for all our documents.
Finally, as mentioned before, our proto-persona changed from social worker to case managers. We had anticipated this as our personas were based on the assumption we had made. Even though this meant we had to go back to re-evaluating our personas, I’m glad we caught this early, as it gave us a better understanding of what to look for moving forward.
At the end of the first sprint, we took a week off from working on Horizon and revisited the progress we have made with a fresh mind at the start of Sprint 2.
Sprint 2 - Week 1
We used the first week of the second sprint to revisit the documentation we had initially created at the start of sprint 1. We started off by re-evaluating our assumptions and found through the interview that they had slightly changed.
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We learned from the interview that our initial assumption that homeless populations have low literacy rates turned out to be false as a lot of them had at least some form of education. In addition to this, we were told that a lot of homeless people actually own phones or even smartphones.
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Both these renewed assumptions worked in our favor as we could now add a lot more text to the kiosk interface, as well as add phone numbers for different locations so homeless people can contact them directly for information.
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Besides reprioritizing some features, our backlog did not change much and we were set to implement the rest of the features into the kiosk.
Updated assumptions based on user interviews.
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Updated assumptions based on user interviews.
Sprint 2 - Week 2
The second week of this sprint was dedicated to prototyping. We started working in Figma and concentrated on the map feature as it was one of the most important aspects of the kiosk.
We added filters to the menu as well as an accordion menu to the left. The filter updates content and only provides relevant information to the users. We added a "get directions" feature that allows the user to get information about public transportation and how to get to their desired location.
Sprint 2 - Week 3
The third week of the sprint was dedicated to user testing and interviews. We struggled to get additional user testing sessions for this sprint but managed to get one with the director of KSU's CARE center right after the sprint was scheduled to end.
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This interview was a reality check for us as it was from an administrator's perspective who works in the field. We were informed that data collection will be a difficult task to accomplish as some people can refuse to give their information.
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In this interview, we learned that a lot of the shelters run on donations and it might not be feasible to implement something like Horizon in smaller shelters.
Main menu of Horizon's interface
Horizon's map feature with filters and location details.
Public transportation details provided by Horizon.
Takeaways
Having a team that is willing to put in the extra work was crucial to the success of Horizon. I was lucky to have one such team. Working on the prototype can get overwhelming very quickly. Delegating is important and can get a lot of work off the shoulders of just one person.
