Stockport Local
A marketplace comprising local community groups, services and charities.For some this is a perfectly fine and even preferred method of existence, but for other members of society this is having devastating consequences.
Sections of society, particularly the elderly, are becoming increasingly isolated and rarely have the opportunity to interact with people.
I was tasked with designing a product that could help to promote communities and enable local groups, charities and organisations in and around Stockport to promote their activities and services.
By doing the likes of audience identification, empathy mapping, user journey mapping and sketching, we were able to gain an understanding of some of the problems we needed to solve and initial thoughts on how to go about providing the best possible experience for users.
The initial thoughts stemmed around the information architecture and how to appropriately structure the vast sums of content that the product would contain.
This was an issue that I pushed back against, due to the fact that I believed incorporating two search facilities on one page would increase cognitive load and distract users from their achieving their goal.
There would also be a significant reliance on my team to maintain the extensive list of search terms within a third party search engine that was very much in its developmental infancy.
In order to prove out the difficulty of enabling keyword search, I completed a swot analysis in order to showcase to stakeholders the concerns I held.
It soon became clear that filtering would be a key navigation component, which needed to be extensively considered to ensure that it provided a robust method of allowing users to find the content they need.
My wireframes also allowed me to showcase and discuss my initial findings in a presentable format, that could be easily interpreted and understood.
This meant that I was able to gain early thoughts from users on my progress. This feedback helped to feed into the high fidelity mockups that I would soon produce.
Some of the feedback I received showed that:
- using a natural language navigation increased cognitive load and slowed users down
- users wanted more information about organisations and charities
- there was much confusion about the different between community groups and local services
At this stage of the process, I understood that I need to ensure that users were met with a product that enticed them to interact with it.
Community groups and services wanted the ability to visually promote themselves and it was clear from my initial user research that users wanted something more than simply words on a page.
For many local community groups, this platform is their sole web presence and a means of online promotion that they would otherwise not have enjoyed.
The use of cards provided a clear interface pattern that could be utilised and replicated in many different situations. The degree of re-usability of this pattern would prove important when considering the design of other aspects of the wider website.
The implementation of an administrative platform, where users could edit their own information, meant that I was able to consider opening up conversation with the owners of groups and services.
After discussions with local groups, it became clear that they didn’t have time to always ensure that their content was completely up to date. This proved that a notification system needed to be implemented, ensuring that groups knew that they needed to reassess their content.
This meant that gps location search, filtering by the nearest results, was a hugely important capability that was a necessary feature.
Consequently, this meant that it was important for social workers to be able to share a selection of suitable results to their clients.
I proposed being able to ‘favourite’ results, which can then be collated and exported via various different means of sharing.