In what ways do relocated new grads adapt and adjust to an unfamiliar urban city for a new job?
What factors might influence their ability to adapt and adjust?
Design Process
Solution
A location tagging system for new grads to meet each other in the city through individual exploration. New grads can find and save tags posted around the city and meet others who value the same locations.
Research & Synthesis
Stakeholders
First, we set some parpameters around the audience of our solution. We didn’t look into specific majors of new grads, but worked with/for those who moved to an urban city rather than a rural area.
Initial Desk Research: Competitive Analysis
We did a quick round of desk research and explored different community-building, resident-connecting, relationship-starting apps and services. We found out that there are abundant solutions for brief travelers and long-time residents, but not much for new residents who are just moving in to town.
Primary Research: Method
We recruited 16 participants for the primary research and went through 1-hour interview sessions including six study methods below.
Primary Research: Synthesis
The data from research was gathered and grouped into trending topics. These trending topics were selected into insights, which were then narrowed down into 5 key insights through the design principles that we developed.
Primary Research: Sense-Making
After finalizing the key insights, we developed a persona that reflects the circumstances and pain points of the participants. Then, we designed a journey map of the persona going about her weekend to make sense of the insights we gathered.
Ideation
8x8 + Dot Method
For the first step of Ideation we ran multiple rounds of 8x8 brainstorming. We selected the idea that best represented our design principles, along with the dot method to vote on the team’s favorites.
Prototyping
Lofi Prototype + Testing
We first designed low fidelity flows for two different directions. The first direction allows users to explore and find tags nautrally, whereas the second direction leaves all the public tags visible. We then tested these concepts along with the sticker prototypes and drew insights.
Hifi: Sticker Tags
The sticker tag was designed to capture attention and briefly introduce the intention of scout. It also has an illustration to signify tap interactions through NFC (Near-field communication) for people to easily access with their mobile phones as they do with modern days mobile payment services.
Hifi: Key Flows + Visual Language
We prototyped key flows to show specific steps of use cases. The flows include: onboarding, tagging a tag, connecting and contributing to the community, posting a tag, and using hints to find tags around locations.
The visual language was thought out with intentions of creating memorable moments, meaningful interactions, and popping colors.
