Project Description
A mobile app designed to assist budget-conscious people in discovering and crafting new experiences, all while saving money and immersing themselves in the vibrant community of Echo Park.
Design Team
Arthur Jensen | Lois Kim | Sammy Schreier
My Role
User Research | UX Design | UI Designer |Video Editor
Project Duration
Fall 2023 | 16-week Project
Project Tools
Miro | Figma | Google Suite | Premiere Pro 2023
Design Brief (Academic Project)
Working in teams, the challenge is to create an interactive system that solves transportation and mobility issues within a city center. It must be based on research, and where you find an example of a system that suffers from a severe design issue that your team will help solve.
Problem
Echo Park is a hidden oasis in the heart of the bustling city of Los Angeles. This area is filled with long-standing, charming small businesses and a vibrant, creative culture that has also undergone physical changes over the years. As a result, longtime residents and businesses of Echo Park are the ones who have paid the cost of this change as their cost of living has increased, making it difficult for them to continue their stay.
Along with the physical change and financial burden, some misconceptions have also developed due to gentrification as there is this idea that Echo Park has transformed itself into a neighborhood that caters to a certain demographic.
Key Insights of Echo Park
Insight
Low-income households spend 75% of monthly expenditures on goods and services necessary for basic shelter, health, and nutrition. Enabling individuals to enjoy enriching experiences without compromising their financial well-being on essentials like rent and transportation.
“The remodeling of Echo Park Lake along with the implementation of the Glendale Corridor Gang Injunction prioritize spaces of pleasure for white bodies at the expense of Latinx communities.”
“In 2011, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park received $45 million dollars to close down and renovate Echo Park Lake. Renovations included cleaning the lake and creating new tourist infrastructures such as paddle boats and a coffee shop.”
Unfamiliarity
Despite Echo Park’s appeal, there’s a lack of awareness and a huge sense of unfamiliarity that prevents people from exploring this neighborhood.
Despite Echo Park’s appeal, there’s a lack of awareness and a huge sense of unfamiliarity that prevents people from exploring this neighborhood.
Misconception
As Echo Park has changed due to gentrification, people have developed a misconception that Echo Park has transformed into a more trendy community, creating a barrier to exploring a new neighborhood.
As Echo Park has changed due to gentrification, people have developed a misconception that Echo Park has transformed into a more trendy community, creating a barrier to exploring a new neighborhood.
Financial Limitations
The economic challenges faced by low-income households limit their ability to find and engage in affordable leisurely activities.
The economic challenges faced by low-income households limit their ability to find and engage in affordable leisurely activities.
Solution:
Granting people the freedom to enjoy life without choosing between essential needs and recreation. We sought to create a user-friendly interactive system that gives visitors a delightful experience in Echo Park.
We started to wonder what exploring could look like if there was a way to help plan and personalize each experience within Echo Park, specifically to provide delightful experiences to budget-conscious visitors as they familiarize themselves with this neighborhood.
Methods of Research
- Field Research
- Secondary Research
- Local Interviews
To uncover issues of mobility and transportation within Echo Park, my team and I walked around the neighborhood to make observations on how people are currently using the space.
Curious about the night-life of Echo Park, I set out to conduct interviews and found that more people come out to Echo Park from surrounding neighborhoods of Los Angeles to enjoy the activities, events, and food. People who used to live in Echo Park before the gentrification also noted that the space has completely changed and is now a space that does feel safe to wander around and explore.
After analyzing and discussing the information we’ve gathered, the team and I concluded key issues that circulated in Echo Park and acknowledged how this space also contains green spaces while being surrounded by both businesses and residents.
Knowing that we cannot change the current infrastructure that currently exists, we took a step back and worked with what Echo Park has to offer and used that to our advantage. This also led to looking at how we might ensure a delightful and efficient wayfinding experience for locals and visitors to and within Echo Park. This in turn made us dive deeper and ask ourselves:
How we might provide budget-conscious people methods to prepare a fun, customizable trip to and around Echo Park?
Persona Development
The persona of Julia Hernandez came to fruition that encapsulates the frustrations, stress, and overwhelming feeling one goes through in trying to discover new things to do with, especially when it is located in an unfamiliar neighborhood.
Julia, a dedicated single mom of two, has a difficult time discovering affordable things to do with her children, outside of their home. She is frustrated with how much she’s been working lately and not having enough time for her kids. She doesn’t even know where to start planning, let alone find activities both her kids would enjoy.
Ideation Phase
As a team, we pitched three concepts we felt were our strongest forms of tackling different aspects of the broader problem. After the feedback session from the pitch, we dove into each concept and broke them down as to what would be the most beneficial to our specific target audience -- a single mom of two.
We thought about what seemed the most practical and moved forward with a mixture of Immerse with Echo and Plan Like A Local. The idea was to create a more humanistic navigational system that would accompany a person as they endure a long commute to an unfamiliar place.
Overall feedback
Discussion about the important features
Deep dive into who we are designing for and our 'How Might We..." statement
Wireframes & User Testing Insights
As we moved into testing out our paper prototype and our digital prototypes, we continued to hear people actively state the use of Google Maps for the navigation system we intended to implement.
We felt a bit discouraged in creating this navigation system and pivoted to something that could be introduced early on in the onboarding section and the exploration of the app. So we decided to pivot and focus on the Personal Itinerary so that people can just utilize Google Maps as their navigation system since most people are familiar with this kind of system.
Final Designs
Personalize | Itinerary
Through our user tests and research, we found that incorporating personalization into the app enhances user engagement and exploration.
By allowing users to select their interests, the app creates a pre-made itinerary with suggestions that align with the users’ preferences.
This not only creates a more enjoyable and personalized experience but also encourages users to venture into an unfamiliar area like Echo Park.
Deals
Through research about the financial constraints low-income households face, being able to implement deals would help ensure that users can enjoy fun experiences on any budget.
Featured deals that expire soon to give users an incentive to explore. Including deals for small, local businesses provides a way to bring in people to Echo Park to increase awareness of the misconception about gentrification surrounding Echo Park.
Explore
During our user tests, we also discovered that many users expressed feeling overwhelmed with information overload.
Users are able to view local businesses based on food, activities, or events. We've also implemented a category system that allows for quick and easy browsing. The user also has the ability to search for specific businesses, ensuring a quick and catered experience.
Map
The map view offers a visual layout of local businesses, enhancing spatial awareness.
Incorporating a budget filter enables users to streamline their choices based on financial considerations, ensuring a budget-friendly exploration experience.
Reflection
The last 16 weeks working on this intensive project have made me appreciate the unique perspectives and opinions of others and I have grown to be comfortable in expressing both my ideas as well as concerns. By expressing my need for constant communication, I was able to elaborate on my thought process and how I crave understanding, so having open, deep-thinking discussions was a large part of this.
In the first few weeks of the project, my team and I allowed ourselves to be steered by research as we uncovered issues and pleasantries within Echo Park. The clearer the issues were, the more ideas we generated. We've had in-depth discussions to reel us back to the key issues to ensure that we are designing for the intended purpose we set out. We have pivoted from one concept to another at crucial moments in different points of this project that we did not take lightly.
During our discussions, we talked about the next steps for Echo Park Embark as this idea could be applied to other regions or communities that have undergone gentrification to bring awareness to long-standing businesses to people who look to explore new areas outside of their homes.
