NEWham

Project highlights

Discovery

Who are we designing for?

◉ What's the problem?

We spoke to the staff of London Borough of Newham, John, about the situation they want to change and things they've started and see effectiveness on.

Here are some things they've done and was somehow effective

• Local workshops (Youth Empowerment Weekly Programme, etc.)

• Community consultations (Newham Co-create)

• Local organisations outreach

Although these activities are very engaging, but they don't necessarily direct to street cleanliness, which is the government wants to focus on now. From the enforcement point of view, the Newham government has also fined a few people in the past. But they prefer a motivation than a punishment. What they really look for is a platform that bring the people together, and better, clean up the streets.

◉ Stakeholder Interview

It's important to know what everybody thinks. Thus, we conducted a series of informal interviews with residents, shop owners and online community members in Newham to understand how people currently engage with their neighbourhood and what motivates them to contribute to local initiatives.

Although most people are willing to contribute to the environment, there are 2 problems they're facing:

• Don't have the information about the activities

• Don't have enough energy for a complex problem outside of personal duties

  
  

To turn that into opportunities, we could say:

• People would participate for rewards, and social rewards is one of the best ways to motivate them

• If the clean-up activities are more fun-driven over mission-oriented, people would more likely to join

Into Newham

Newham is a dynamic community with people from all over the world. With median age aged around 31 - 32, which is much younger than the UK average, the borough is full of young generation. It's also highly diverse, with 42% pan-Asian, 17% Black and 31% White. Thus, the borough is multilingual, with only 65% report English as their main language. It's also a rapidly growing borough of population 370k with strong growth over the past decade, which makes integration a hard bone.

Secondary Research

What does psychology say?

Here are some tricks I found useful / playful during the research…

The IKEA Effect

The IKEA Effect is a really useful idea for your project because it explains why people value things more when they help create them. The term comes from the furniture company IKEA, where customers assemble their own furniture. Even though the work is minimal, people feel more attached to the final product because they contributed to building it. Researchers in Behavioural Economics found that people often overvalue things they helped create, even if the effort was small.

Competitor Analysis

I started off by monitoring direct and indirect competitors that provide similar concepts to my product: social integration, community news and litter report & cleaning. By doing so, I was able to hack into the definitive factors of what makes a successful civil app.

Prioritisation Matrix

Here is a 2x2 prioritisation matrix to categorise the priorities based on the interview & research. From here, I decided on the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) features for the product.

Wireframing

This low-fidelity wireframe was used in mid-term presentation and we later on conducted a series of useful testings out of it.

AB Testing

In order to simplify and streamline the report process, I tested both screens below and see which would lead to more reports:

We tested on 15 people to use both screens. 9 out of them found b) was much easier to use. Here are the written feedback:

1. Screen with the Upload Image button in a prominent position received more reports

2. Most user say that they don't mind filling the name, date and place boxes, which was different than what we had expected

I was interested in why a small button change could result in such a big difference. I later figured it out that it has to do with how the interaction works.

Interaction

• Similar size task boxes - Cognitive load ↑

• Obvious task target - Cognitive load ↓

  … and supported by a study as well.

"When interactions are less visually disruptive, users perceive the system as faster, even if the actual response time is the same."

— Nielsen, J. (1993). Usability Engineering.

Once the rule is clear, I applied this finding on other screens as well: