Stockport Local

THE THING

We are increasingly living in an insular bubble, with fewer and fewer interactions with neighbours and people in the local community.

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.

THE PROBLEM

This wide array of users, with a significant variety of needs, meant that this was a challenging problem that also had the potential to improve the health and wellbeing of the people of Stockport.

We did this in conjunction with Business Analysts, Product Owners and Delivery Managers, who helped to facilitate the inception process.

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.

DISCOVERY

EARLY INSIGHTS

Who is this for?

Users want control of their content

BRAINSTORM

The initial forays into design ultimately began with a bit of intimacy between a whiteboard and I.

I often find that having the ability to write, sketch and design interactions on a whiteboard allows me to dump lots of information in one clear space and easily delete and move ideas around.

The initial thoughts stemmed around the information architecture and how to appropriately structure the vast sums of content that the product would contain.

There was strong pressure from numerous stakeholders to incorporate a keyword search specifically for the directory.

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.

WIREFRAME

With such a wide array of ideas, wireframing proved to be an important step in ensuring that I was able to stay on the straight and narrow.

By completing quick and simple wireframes in Balsamiq, I was able to focus on information hierarchy and user journeys rather than getting hung up on high fidelity design decisions.

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

HIGH FIDELITY

With a clear direction, based on my findings and validated assumptions, I was able to delve into producing high fidelity mockups and creating something that users could truly connect with.

It’s always tempting to delve into high fidelity mockups as soon as possible. This is a dangerous mistake to make and can causes hours of lost hours following long winded mistakes.

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.

The introduction of a card based interface, providing space for imagery and snippets of key information.

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.

INSPIRE CONFIDENCE

Few things reduce confidence in government services than out of date and incorrect information.

It was therefore vital to introduce a way of ensuring that content was not left to go stale and untouched for a considerable period of time.

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.

WHAT’S NEAR ME

Social workers visiting people’s homes proved to be an inspiring user case, which provided a strong incentive to get things right.

It was vital to be able to allow social workers to find information in different communities around Stockport.

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.

Here’s an early prototype of Stockport Local. It’s quite rudimentary in parts but it should provide context to my ramblings.