UX/UI
Design Research
Project Overview
The Co-Up Project began with an interest in pop-up parks and pop-up park services. We were interested in providing unique spaces and experiences to people who were in need of green spaces and community. The main challenges to this goal are that many communities already have access to green space, most communities hate it when outside programs establish spaces for them, and having community spaces does not mean they will be used. The Co-Up Project solves these problems by utilizing non-biased surveying and working with community leadership to establish unique spaces and experiences catered to each community. This is done through the use of our unique pop-up survey booth and companion website.
Roles and Assets
- Nick Voss :: Research Lead, Website Lead, Booth UX/UI Support
- Other Team Members :: Colin Morris (UI and Branding Lead) and Aundrea Verdi (UX Lead)
- Image Sources :: Photographs courtesy of Unsplash under Unsplash License and Adobe Firefly under the Adobe Generative AI User Guidelines
Final Outcomes
Project Journey (1/4) :: Getting Started
How Do We Do Parks?
My team and I quickly found ourselves in the unique position of creating and delivering parks. We knew that our parks needed to improve people’s lives… Our challenge that was we are not experts on parks, and we didn’t know how parks were conceptualized nor all the ways parks can improve people’s lives.
Phase Goals
- Baseline park research
- Initial goal statement
- Create and send surveys
Baseline Research
We had to start somewhere, so we generated a few questions to guide our research and got to work. Here are some of the questions that we wanted to answer followed by some of our findings:
- What do other park services do?
- What are the different types of parks?
- Who specifically are we making these park for?
- What do those people want in a park?
- What is our exact reason for making these parks?
What is Already Being Done?
There are a few different types of park creation services:
- Companies that are paid to build parks for clients
- Non-profit organizations that build parks for free
- Services that improve already existing parks
- Pop-up services that provide temporary experiences
What Kinds of Parks are There?
Parks are highly varied. Their purpose is, or at least should be, crafted for a community’s needs. Park purposes can include:
- Exercise, which features elements like trails or exercise equipment.
- Bringing nature into highly urban environments, which may be as simple as a grassy patch with a tree and a bench or a large field bordered by trees.
- Family, which involves features like jungle gyms, splash pads, etc.
- Community engagement, which includes amenities like stages, gazebos, tennis courts, etc.
- Sports, which requires areas crafted for activities like soccer, tennis, football, etc.
What Places Need Parks?
To figure out our target demographics, we first needed to know general areas of need for parks. Some of our original ideas and findings were:
- Low income communities. Many of these communities lack safe spaces, struggle with community engagement, and require assistance with park upkeep.
- Urban areas. Especially in big cities, there might be an interest in access to green spaces or green spaces that come to you.
- Neighborhoods and small rural communities. Parks with amenities are expensive, so maybe small communities are in need of free or discounted park services.
A First Goal Statement
After a brief research session, we felt that we now knew enough about parks to create our first goal statement. We did however have to acknowledge that our research was limited and may not capture the full picture. For now, we wanted to focus more on the idea of the pop-up park and park service. At this point we were still looking into both permanent and temporary features. Our first goal statement was:
We want to repurpose underutilized spaces into temporary or permanent parks that give communities access to green space and amenities they currently lack.
The First Survey
The goal of the first survey was to confirm our findings on how people use their local parks, check our understanding of who might need a park, and to formally decide a target user. Below are images of our first survey:
Project Journey (2/4) :: Reality Check
Unexpected Survey Responses
The results of the survey did not fall in line with our original plans. This left us without a clear target audience, but it did leave us with new paths to explore. The survey results are below:
Phase Goals
- Begin more directed research
- Loosely figure out how to approach our goal
Results from Survey 1
As students, our access to survey distribution was limited, so we had to rely on personal connections. Even though our responses were limited in number, they were enlightening. The survey revealed clear issues in our plan. Park access is far more common then we expected in urban areas, and when people were asked what they desired most in their parks, they wanted complex amenities like trails and pools, which require indefinite upkeep. Massive projects with indefinite upkeep does not fit with the ideas of a temporary pop-up.
Some important survey results can be seen below:
Interviews Brought up Even More Concerns
Through interviews with our contacts and discussing the pop-up park service, multiple issues arose.
- If this is a pop-up, will we remove the space when we leave, even if people love it?
- If we install permanent amenities, who will take care of it when we leave?
- Do people actually need green spaces in this area?
- “We have a nice park, and no one ever uses it!”
The Second Survey
We realized that we needed more information. One major thing we had noticed is that many nice parks go unused. One thing that was becoming clear was that surveying may be an important aspect to achieving our goal. A second survey was created to gain insight into how people respond to surveying. The survey is pictured below:
Results from Survey 2
Responses for this survey identified potential difficulties with surveying a community about their dream park. The biggest issue we identified from this survey is that it’s hard to get people to take your surveys. Most people displayed interest in providing feedback for public projects, but they also noted that they rarely do because of how inconvenient it is to do so. They gave reasons such as having time conflicts during the brief survey periods, it being frustrating to deal with public forums, and generally being unaware of such surveys.
The most important survey results can be seen below:
Pivoting our Direction
From our interviews, surveys, and additional baseline research, it was becoming clear that a pop-up to establish green spaces was not particularly needed. We also found that temporary services that create parks would also need to secure continued maintenance and upkeep services. That’s when one particular interview delivered us a better path to pursue:
One of our contacts from the local Texas area told us of a pop-up that had come through her town. The pop-up simply came and provided a free movie night for the community. While she could not remember the name of the organization, we found other examples of pop-up events, and we decided it was worth looking into. We decided to further research the following questions:
- Are good park spaces actually already common?
- What are pop-up events like?
- Does our current goal make sense?
Are Good Park Spaces Already Common?
In researching the availability of good park spaces we found:
- The vast majority of mid-high income communities already have plenty of nearby green spaces and parks
- Because of increased numbers of park building non-profits, low income communities also have green spaces and parks, but most of those spaces go unused.
- Unused space was a consistent theme, with mid-high income communities also underutilizing their park spaces.
What are Pop-up Events?
We wanted to know what kind of events lend themselves to the pop-up environment. We found that:
- The University of Pittsburgh hosts a bi-annual pop-up mini art festival. The mini art festival is held in a large parking lot within a lower income community. High numbers of families come to enjoy making art with their kids.
- Websites like Eventbrite, Meetup, and Nextdoor allowed individuals and groups to organize their own pop ups, like cookouts, community yoga, concerts, etc.
- Pop-up events could be anything. Examples we found included working out, fishing, bonfires, art, movies, frisbee golf, reading, etc.
What Kind of Issues Could Pop-up Events Solve?
We really wanted to know whether pop-up events aligned in any way to our own pre-existing goals. We found that pop-up events could:
- Encourage community engagement in small groups or entire communities.
- Bring exciting activities and fun to communities that are far from cities.
- Be used to encourage political action or band people together over common causes.
A New Goal Statement
It was clear after continued research that our original goal needed revision. After all we’d learned, the team reached an agreement on the below goal. It was time to start solving problems.
We want to repurpose underutilized spaces into parks or events that encourage community engagement, and we want to do this by drawing advice and guidance from the community itself.
Project Journey (3/4) :: Planning out the Solution
Approaching Our New Goal
The team and I had discovered a number of pain points, and we had discovered how some other organizations handle similar goals. Now it was time for us to begin solving problems, especially ones that no one else was.
Phase Goals
- Think about solutions
- Fill in final missing pieces of research
- Find a formal direction
- Create UX prototypes
How Might We's
Each member of the team listed out parts of the project that we may need to solve. This board would serve as a guide moving forward. This set of how might we’s was a continually changing list. Pictured Here is the final list:
Needs Statements
This board details community needs that we would ideally like to address with our solution:
Community Event Types
It seemed like if we were to address a variety of community needs, it was important to keep track of examples of community event types. This board contains some of our examples:
Filling In the Gaps in the Research
We were still lacking some vital information. While the other group members began sketching out UX ideas, I researched how to make fair and unbiased surveys and looked for some sort of categorization system for the many types of hobbies and activities people do. Below are some of my findings:
Problems with Participatory Design
When designing for communities through the use of surveying, there are potential pitfalls we must watch out for:
- The timing of participatory periods are crucial. If you only survey at certain times, only people available at those times can give feedback.
- Due to mathematical, scientific, legal, and technical details involved in major projects, the average citizen can not be taught to understand every facet of the project.
- Designers can fall prey to “the designer’s ego,” where the designer decides what’s best for a community, even when the data says otherwise.
- If residents are not equally represented, you can miss the opinions of large groups of community stakeholders.
Survey Bias
With our final solution now looking like it would heavily rely on surveying, we needed to make sure we do not force the community into poor decisions they wouldn’t normally make. Here are the main areas where surveys become biased:
- Sampling size :: sampling only small groups of the community can lead to responses that disregard, at the worst, the majority of residents.
- Leading Questions :: questions like, “wouldn’t you like to have fabulous green spaces?” give the survey a biased tone in favor of one of the answers. This can cause someone to agree, despite not actually being interested in more green space.
- Question Order Bias :: In survey questions with many answers, survey participants may select the first option that somewhat applies to them and miss that a later option fully applies to them. Additionally, one question may inadvertently influence how someone answers the next question, especially if there are any leading questions.
- Social Desirability Bias :: certain groups can be lead to answer certain ways when your survey relies on ‘activist’ terminology. For example, when the question reads, “would you like a park that helps end global warming?,” but you’re really just asking whether they want a park. How could someone who is passionate about the planet answer ‘No’ to your question?
Categories of Interests & the "Serious Leisure Perspective"
If events were going to play a role in our surveying, then we needed to know how to survey general interests across broad categories. One useful source that I found was the “Serious Leisure Perspective,” which was a study of hobby activities, categories, and levels of hobby commitment. Some key takeaways were:
- A list of many hobbies, categorized by Category, Sub-Category, and then Hobby
- The idea of casual, project-based, and serious hobbies and how they’re different. This makes it possible to understand volunteering, political action, art, gardening, and sports all as hobbies.
- A little bit of a taste of what kind of activities we may have to be prepared to host events for.
Our Solution
With the research wrapping up. It was time to decide what our solution would be. Are we a park business, an event non-profit, survey based, about community? What we decided is this:
We would be a non-profit service that comes to a community. We would pick leadership from that community, who would make decisions about what the final event would be. This should ensure the project is less susceptible to the organization’s own bias. These community leaders would also be trained by us to be able to continue any event or continue to care for any park after we left. To source what the community wants most, we would bring one or more AR survey booths to the space in which the event or park would be. The AR survey booth would be there for weeks, to make sure everyone in the community has ample opportunity to take the survey, and the unique nature of an AR booth should ideally make taking the survey more attractive.
Facets of the Plan
- Using leadership from the community to make final decisions and upkeep any parks
- Training that leadership to perform its roles, and advising the leadership during the project
- Using a fun and interactive AR booth to promote the survey and encourage engagement
- Creating a companion website that serves as the community’s way to check on the progress of the project
Project Journey (4/4) :: UX
Designing the Booth
We all felt that it was time to design our booth and survey. The most important things we needed to be cognizant of were survey bias, accessibility, and handling the many styles of parks and events people might want.
Phase Goals
- Create User Flows
- Sketch out UX ideas
- Create low-fidelity prototypes
User Flow
Taking into account our goal and our research, we came up with the following user flow. We wanted to have each survey taker start their journey entering our booth. Then they would pick a settings, like language and accessibility, and learn about the project. They would next give info on their demographics and interests and finish by building a sample vision of their ideal park. Afterwards they would receive a card to continue to the website. below is that flow:
Sketching Out Ideas
We started the visual design process by quickly making small thumbnail sketches of how we each felt that certain elements of the design should be. Then each member created a full version of the flow from start to finish, and we combined the best parts of each into one full paper prototype.
UX Round One
On the first round of UX prototypes, there were some clear issues. We had an idea to have an interest section where different topics would randomly float by, allowing you to tap ones you liked. In the first round of UX though, we struggled to give the design an organic feel without overly highlighting one category over another. Wording was also a major challenge. It was also pointed out to us that if we use an AR feature we would need a disclaimer at the start of the survey, as well as a way to disable the AR capabilities. Finally, we still didn’t know how to approach the AR builder yet. Some pages from our first low-fidelity prototype are below:
UX Round Two
On the second version, we added some additional pages we found we were missing, like additional demographics recording. We also further developed the interests portion of the survey. Our new plan for it was to have broad categories float by. When you would click a category, you would be given a few options to choose from or add your own option. You could then back out and continue interacting with other categories.
Next Steps
After designing and testing our UX prototypes. It was time to create the website and apply branding and UI. Due to the limited timeframe left for the project and the fact that we wanted the survey to have a high degree of clarity, our approach to UI was quite minimalist. The companion website was also given a minimalist approach.
The project was received positively. The biggest critique was that there needed to be a booth mockup, which I created later and is included in the final outcomes at the top of this page.
