Waze

Overview

People who want to take part in social change and community improvement often fail to do so because of unnecessary barriers in their communities. They need an easy way to gain and share awareness with up-to-date, location-based information. Our focus was to create an app that would act as a medium for community building in order to ultimately create awareness and promote social change.  To develop an app that encourages social change. We decided to base our concept around Waze as it effectively encourages users to engage with their community by publishing and validating things they see on the road.

Research

First, we did a heuristic comparative analysis and feature comparison between user generated and social good apps (Waze, foursquare, Swarm, and Social Effort) to understand the pros, cons and features worth mimicking. We compared Waze with other competitors to highlight its strengths and weaknesses and to show the value of our hypothesis that users would engage more with social good if it was easily accessible to them.  

Screener and Interviews

Because social change is defined and valued by people in varying degrees, we decide to focus our sample on people in New York ages 22-60. We created and distributed a survey, receiving 46 responses. We learned the most important qualities to our users are awareness, common interest, interpersonal connection, and personalized experience. They have experienced issues with defining their communities, facing barriers to involvement as newcomers, and sharing knowledge with other community members.

We then conducted 12 user interviews from survey respondents, who ranged from their mid-twenties to mid-sixties with varying levels of community engagement and tech expertise. We learned about their opinions on creating social change and how to ultimately encourage people to become more involved.  

Affinity Mapping

We found that community is consistently defined based on location followed by common interests. People are most motivated by empathy and understanding what is going on around them, but often expressed a lack of access to opportunities to help. 

Personas

Scenario
Wren wants to alert others nearby about a protest going on outside her office. While walking down the boardwalk, Wren sees a huge crowd of people gathering and wants to find out what is going on.
User Stories
 As a caring person, Wren wants to volunteer but does not think it will make much of a difference.
Job Story
 When Wren participates in her friend’s coat drive, she wants to be recognized for her help, so she knows she made an impact. 

Our Minimum Viable Product

We translated our key findings into features. We created a filtering system to help users find opportunities near them based on their interests. We maintained gamification to incentivize users to provide feedback and updates, and we tweaked the map to make it more location based and interactive. The gamification elements encourage friendly competition between friends to show who is more engaged in their community, prompting users to report things around them or attend events.  

User Testing

We conducted six user tests with people in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties using different levels of wireframe fidelity to test functionality and UI. We found that people quickly understood the overall functionality and value of the product but found some UI elements confusing. On page land they didn’t want to see a pre-populated map as there didn’t seem to much value to the user before they filtered their interest. They also found the hamburger menu unclear as there were so many different parts to the app already that the icon seemed vague.  

Conclusion

Overall, we are happy with our minimum viable product and will continue to iterate on it until we feel it is ready to pitch to Waze or be rebranded.