New in Town is a mobile app that enables recent college graduates that are moving to a new city to acclimate themselves to their future destinations. Our team designed an app that acts as a directory for all of the different social events and locations each city has to offer. Users can search for places to visit, see what locals recommend, and bookmark places to view later.
In 7 weeks, our team conducted user research, ideated, sketched, and prototyped ideas to create an application that would not only satisfy our users but would also create a real solution to the hardships they currently face.
My Responsibilities: For this project, I was the Product Lead and delegated tasks. I was in charge of conducting user research, wireframing, usability testing, and prototyping.
As young adults who graduate from college move to new locations to take advantage of new opportunities, they oftentimes have difficulty developing a new support system and community from scratch. Consequently, they need a resource that will provide them with social connections and a community.
Our team's main goal was to discover the main challenges that recent college graduates face. As a result, we concluded that user interviews would be the most effective way to gather in-depth data. I crafted the interview questions and as a group, we conducted 8 user interviews with college graduates who were between the ages of 21–25.
Given the current circumstances, all of our users' travel plans were halted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We also discovered that if they were currently employed, they were working remotely from home.
Our main findings include:
Using the synthesized research data, we started brainstorming “How Might We” statements to help narrow down our focus to effectively address our user pain points.
I then tried to sketch all possible solutions that could (1) help further users’ careers, (2) develop support systems, (3) lower user stress and anxiety during this transition to adulthood, and (4) provide more resources for real-world challenges.
Although we tried to focus on just 1 to 2 of these user pain points, it was too difficult to synthesize so many multifaceted problems into a single platform.
Consequently, we were overwhelmed and lost focus, so we had to backtrack, rethink our whole approach, and narrow it back down to our primary problem:
How might we help recent college graduates better integrate into new communities?
3 out of our 4 users’ pain points all had an overlapping goal: they ultimately wanted to feel more secure in the new area they have just moved to.
As a solution, we designed an app that acted as a directory and had all the social events and locations each city had. Once the user is more familiar with their living area, the user would feel more comfortable meeting new people or trying new things.
Mid-Fidelity Prototypes: With our new solution in mind, we primarily wanted to incorporate the following into our app:
Create levels for different types of users: Observer (newcomer in town), Adventurer (middle), Local (end goal: very familiar with the city).
Hi-Fidelity Prototypes: For our final product, we implemented five different features into the “New In Town” app: an onboarding questionnaire, the home page, search by category, search by typing, and bookmarking. I was responsible for creating the design system, components, and interactions.
1. Onboarding: When the user opens the app, they will be asked to provide personal information about themselves and reveal the new town the user moved to. I came up with the concept of categorizing the user as either an Explorer (new to the town) or a Local (very familiar with the town). The user will then rank certain locations and categories based on their personal preferences.
2. Home Page: After the onboarding process, the user is taken to the Home Page. The available features include the search bar, search by category, “Suggested for You,” “Suggested by Locals,” and user-selected categories. This customized page allows users to explore new places and familiarize themselves with the area.
3. Searching: Explorers are unfamiliar with the city they have just moved to, so search bars allow them to discover new places. To help familiarize them with the area, they can:
4. Bookmarking: To help users remember where they want to explore, they can:
Our team learned how to overcome adversity and adapt to changing situations. Due to unforeseen circumstances, one of our team members could no longer continue working on the design sprint. Since we had one less designer, each team member had to take on an additional role. Despite this, we overcame this difficult situation by delegating tasks and working overtime.
I learned the importance of narrowing down and synthesizing diverse research findings, specifically to work toward solving a single problem rather than all of our user’s pain points. Especially with a limited time constraint, an inadequate or inefficient synthesis could lead to greater problems down the road as we experienced ourselves. This project only reinforced that design is a constant, iterative process.
If given more time, we would love to:
Want to read more about this project? Check out my team's Medium article!
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