GOOD SAMARITAN
Utilizing instant delivery apps to give back.
OVERVIEW
Helping the needy can be difficult. Giving in person isn’t always easy due to stigmas related to the homeless and fear of interaction. Charity organizations help but often a large percentage of donations go to overhead and the giver is disconnected from those they are helping. This is where Good Samaritan comes in! Good Samaritan allows users to utilize delivery apps that they may already have on their phone to easily deliver food & goods directly to members of the homeless population.
Context: User Interface Design & Development Class
Initial Iteration: September 12-19th 2019
Second Iteration: November 7th - December 12th 2019
Team: 4 members
My Role: UI/UX Designer
INITIAL ITERATION
For the initial iteration of this project, my team was asked to simply take one week and "design for friction". We decided to deign an app that reduces the social friction that is ever present between people of the homeless and non-homeless populations. I was inspired to develop this app after watching the viral video "Using Amazon Prime Now for good", which lead me to think of how we could utilize other forms of instant delivery apps to give back. Our professor prompted us to design this app with visual pleasure in mind.
GOOD SAMARITAN: TAKE 2
After the initial iteration, I felt like this project had a lot of potential that wasn't reached because of time constraints of designing for an in class assignment. With this said, I rounded up my original team plus one new member and we decided to take this app back to the drawing board and iterate on it properly this time, using the design process described below.
Iteration 2 Design Process
NEEDFINDING
For our initial iteration, the ever important needfinding step was skipped all together. With this said, we took a step back and conducted needfinding interviews on two different user groups:
The people who will be using the app: the donator
The people who will be benefiting from the app: the receiver
Because the people donating with this app would be the only ones interacting with our interface itself, we decided to interview 4 potential users. After working together to craft an interview question guide, each member of the team conducted one needfinding interview.
Donator Interview Example Questions:
Tell me more about a donation experience you remember, either of you or someone else donating something.
Have your donation patterns changed over time?
Some people feel more comfortable donating items to the homeless rather than money, why do you think people have this preference? Do you feel the same way?
Tell me about your experience using on demand delivery apps.
We also realized in developing this app that respect had to be our #1 priority. I had noticed that our first iteration of the app was built under several assumptions of how our users should interact with the person that they wish to donate to. We assumed that the homeless person wouldn't mind being approached and we hadn't put much thought into making the donation experience a safe and healthy encounter. To get a better handle on the homeless perspective, one of my teammates interviewed a homeless gentleman.
MY NEEDFINDING INTERVIEW
Interviewee: Male, age 23, lives in an urban environment
In general, my user thinks that donating money is impersonal and so prefers to donate food to someone that he sees on the streets. He wants to know that his donation will be helping the person that he donates to. However, he often feels uneasy when approaching a homeless person and tends to only approach people who he sees on a daily basis while walking around his neighborhood or people who are actively asking for donations either verbally or with a sign.
User Needs
Needs to know where his money is going
Needs to feel safe when interacting with a homeless person
Needs to know that the impact of his donation will be positive
EMPATHY MAPPING
After all of our interviews were completed, my whole team met up to draw our individual empathy maps and discuss the findings that these maps elicited in order to craft a complete list of user needs and develop our "How Might We" statements. My empathy map is pictured below.
HOW MIGHT WE...
”...decrease social friction?”
"...decrease the barriers towards donation?”
“...mimic the rewarding feeling associated with donating?”
LOW-FI PROTOTYPING
What barriers to donation are we trying to overcome?
Engaging with a stranger on the street
Fear of an unsafe situation
How can we modify our app and add in new elements to help overcome these barriers?
Modify our initial interaction storyboard
Create a disengage button
Provide the user with talking points
Provide the user with an interaction guide
My focus: Create talking points and interaction guide
I looked back on the findings generated from our needfinding interview with the homeless gentleman and did additional research on first person accounts of how homeless people feel when approached by strangers. This research provided me with invaluable findings on how to make this type of interaction a seamless and positive experience. The following is one of my favorite tips:
Getting down to the persons level: A person sitting on the street may feel like they are being talked down to because they are literally being talked down to! Sitting or crouching down to a person's level can make them feel more comfortable, like they are having a conversation among equals.
Such tips would be included in my interaction guide. However, I also created a list of talking points that the user could access on the fly if they are having trouble initiating a conversation or are feeling stuck during a conversation. At this same time, my teammates constructed low-fi prototypes for a disengage screen and constructed multiple low-fi options for our initial walk through that users have to scroll through each time they enter the app.
The initial low-fi sketches of these two pages are shown below, followed by the mid-fi renderings that I created using Figma.
USABILITY TESTING
Once we had our prototypes ready and knew the main question we wanted answered, we moved on to creating our Usability Test Guide. Each member of the group then conducted their own usability test. We showed half of the users one version of our walk-through and half saw another version to determined which was more effective. All users also now had access to a 'disengage' button, which leads to a screen showing advice for getting out of situations in which the user does not feel safe. They also now had access to an interaction menu, with buttons leading to the interaction guide and talking points screens.
Our Goals
Determine if users have enough information to approach a homeless person, if they are doing this for the first time
Determine if the app reduces the social friction of direct donations with the walk-through
Determine if users would prefer using this app to actively donate to the needy around them
Overall User Insights
He found the initial page in the walk through to be confusing, he thought it was odd that he was not first brought to a home screen.
He liked both the interaction guide and talking points but thought that he wouldn’t have time to read through the whole interaction guide on the fly.
Talking points are more useful for quick guidance.
As someone who doesn’t use many instant delivery apps, he didn’t like that he would have to interact through another platform to place the order.
He felt that sharing the donation on social media was braggy and make the donation less genuine.
Usability Takeaways
We should find a way to appeal to people who don’t normally use frequent delivery apps or change our user base to just be those people who already use those apps.
Both the interaction guide and talking points are a useful resource for our user, each with their own unique purpose.
Create an interaction menu so that the user can access both the talking points and interaction guide from the same screen.
Our initial walkthrough can be confusing. We should ease users into the app instead of showing them maps and statistics right off the bat.
Add in more guidance for the users description of the receiver. Perhaps we can ask the user to provide a name and physical description in separate text fields.
Reorder the entry of delivery details in general. User was confused when he would be brought to the partner app.
We should maybe rethink the option to share the donation.
FINAL DELIVERABLE
Building through our parallel iteration phases we realized the importance of social interactions and the barrier of having them with your ‘not-so-regular-folks’, that one may not interact with on a daily basis. People do encounter the homeless everyday, but rarely do people consider interacting with them. We ensured to keep asking our one single question through each of our iterations. To finally deduce our final solution which was considerate of the usability findings & incorporated each of our takeaways.
Improvements Included
A complete introduction to our app, what it was about and how you could walk through to it
A comprehensive interaction, disengage & talking tips guide for users to overcome their stigma and feel as safe as possible before approaching their potential receiver
Micro-interactions to help guide users on how this would work as a real app
An end-to-end connected experience of connection between apps to make it more seamless and easier to comprehend the progression a person would go through while also being able to quantify their impact
VIEW PROTOTYPE
LEARNINGS
Future Extensions
Although this was an in-class project for a design course, I'd love to take further steps to make this app a reality from a more technical end. I would also love to perform additional usability testing based on the last changes made to this app. The final version of this app wasn't exactly designed with aesthetics in mind, so I'd also like to perform additional heuristic evaluation on this app. As I was the group member who came up with the idea for this app, I did have an original vision for this app that got lost along the way that I would like to revert back to. I had originally envisioned this app to be a service that partners with small, local businesses to deliver food and goods, rather than instant delivery apps. As this app was intended to be used in large cities, these small businesses would decide their own delivery radius, with it in mind that many businesses that generally don't offer delivery would only set their radius to fit surrounding blocks. I do agree that it would be more work to establish this system through local businesses rather than with instant delivery apps, but I believe that this format would ultimately build up the local community in more ways than one.
Concern yourself with usability before aesthetics
The first iteration of this app prompted my team to design with certain aesthetic principles in mind. However, when beginning the second iteration of this app, we realized that we needed to take a step back and first design with usability in mind in lieu of purely aesthetic details. With this said, my team immediately removed all color from this app so that we could evaluate it from a more subjective point of view. Overall, this taught me not to be overall concerned with the look of my app during initial stages of development. Going into design, I was overwhelmed looking at how my classmates could develop such 'pretty' apps in a short amount of time. I eventually realized that these apps were simply a smokescreen. Just because an app has a professional looks, doesn't mean that its usability is up to snuff.
Never assume the needs of someone else & the social impact of my work
Over the first iteration of this app, we made a lot of assumptions about how a homeless person would like to be approached and talked to. I am so glad that we came to the realization of how narrow minded this approach was, because our interview with the homeless gentleman gave us invaluable insight. If I was to continue developing this app, I would find it necessary to not only perform additional needfinding interviews with members of the homeless population, but I would also like to test the app in real world scenarios with people on the street. Overall, in developing this app, I learned about the importance of considering how my work can impact people other than my direct users. Technology can have real social impacts and I have learned to always be mindful of the effect that my work may have on others.