Every now and then we encounter someone homeless asking for help, yet we often find ourselves averting eye contact, going as far as avoiding them. Why is that? It's become a stereotype to think that interaction may be unsafe or that donations are misused.
As the year comes to a close, we wanted push ourselves as designers and use technology in a more impactful way. Our team designed Street Samaritan in hopes to bring more help and awareness to the impoverished residents of Los Angeles.
Street Samaritan is a community platform app that allows users to directly and transparently donate to those experiencing poverty or homelessness, along with peace of mind.
It's not that people don't want to help those asking on the streets. But we're often dissuaded by stronger concerns, from our own safety to possible misuse of said donations. Let's target to alleviate those reasons.
As the year came to a close, we wanted push ourselves as designers and use technology in a more impactful way. Our team designed "Street Samaritan"— a community platform concept app that allows users to directly and transparently donate to those experiencing poverty or homelessness, with ease and peace of mind.
My Roles:
UX Researcher
Visual Designer
Interaction Designer
Prototyping and testing
The Tools:
Trello, Miro, Figma, Webflow
The Duration:
3 Weeks
The Members:
Martin Carpio, UX/UI Designer
Erin Kim, UX/UI Designer
Joe Lee, UX/UI Designer
Caroline Pham, UX/UI Designer
The Methods:
🎙 User Interviews
📊 Surveys
🕸 Affinity Diagram
🧟♀️ User Personas
🌈 Storyboard
🤩 Competitor and Feature Analysis
🟨 Brainstorming
🤔 Feature Prioritization Matrix
🌊 User Flows and Journey Mapping
🦴 Wireframes
🤓 Usability Testing
🤖 Interactive Prototype
💻 Website M.V.P.
• What are your views of the homeless community?
• What deters you from donating to homeless people and why?
• How often are you on social media? What social media do you use?
• What attracts you when using social media and why?
Our team conducted a total of 8 interviews (2 per team member) through a network of our own peers. For qualitative data, our goal should be to gather the general opinion about donating and how much of an impact social media can have on their donating habits.
Through Google Surveys, with 19 participants and the majority being female, all between 15-24 years old, and making an average income between $30k-$60k a year. This gives insight in which factors can play a role in creating our personas.
Dividing the findings into an affinity diagram, the highlights of data showed that most people were concerned about the transparency of donation, also that donating habits ranged from giving change on the street to more secure donations done through trustworthy campaigns or organizations they found on social media sites.
The homelessness crisis rates steadily grow each year. In Los Angeles alone, more than 60,000 people are living on the streets. At 50 city blocks, the city comprises of the largest unhoused containment in the United States: Skid Row.
Many find conversations about the homelessness issue to be an uncomfortable subject. Our goal is to create a comfortable space for this diverse community to connect.
The idea was to come up with a user-community platform to introduce individuals in need to (whether it be need for clothes, money, a suit, etc.) in hopes to increase visibility and support. Our initial assumption is that users will feel more inclined to help and donate if these individuals were introduced on a more personal basis.
Our key research objectives were the following:
• Understand people’s opinions about homelessness and their inclination to donate to homeless people
• Determine the impact that visual aids and social media have on people’s willingness to donate
• What are your views of the homeless community?
• What deters you from donating to homeless people and why?
• How often are you on social media? What social media do you use?
• What attracts you when using social media and why?
Our research consisted of:
• 8 qualitative, peer-sourced interviews (2 per member)
• A Google Forms survey, completed by 19 responses
Our team conducted a total of 8 interviews (2 per team member) through a network of our own peers. For qualitative data, our goal should be to gather the general opinion about donating and how much of an impact social media can have on their donating habits.
Through Google Surveys, with 19 participants and the majority being female, all between 15-24 years old, and making an average income between $30k-$60k a year. This gives insight in which factors can play a role in creating our personas.
Dividing the findings into an affinity diagram, the highlights of data showed that most people were concerned about the transparency of donation, also that donating habits ranged from giving change on the street to more secure donations done through trustworthy campaigns or organizations they found on social media sites.
Through our Affinity Diagram, we observed a key insight that reinforced our hypothesis,
that users are discouraged by fear and safety factors:
• Most want to donate but are more concerned about the transparency of their donations.
• Donating habits ranged from either giving smaller to no change on the street, to bigger secure donations through campaigns or organizations they find boosted by social media.
"We're unaware of the marginalized. I hope people see it as a public health concern rather than a result of who they are." -L.G.
"You really cannot judge someone by their worst day." -R.G.
"Homelessness is increasingly becoming a huge problem due to a widening gap between wages and cost of living." -B.D.
We realize that this community has two sides open for users, so we made a decision to create 2 user personas:
1. (Sharon) Target user that utilizes the app to make safe and smart donations conveniently
2. (Henry) End user (referred to as "members") receiving benefits
We felt that, to create empathy throughout our work, it is important to be considerate of both users.
Sharon, is our donor, who commutes to DTLA where she works. She regularly passes by the homeless areas and while she does want to help, she is frustrated because she often has no time, and feels unsafe on the chances she does get.
Henry, our donatee who has been experiencing homelessness after losing his job. Henry is in need of resources to support his daily life. He is willing to accept any generosity that reaches out to him but is frustrated because stigma against the homeless community makes it difficult for people to help.
How might we provide kind people like Sharon with a convenient solution to help the impoverished, while maintaining the safety and comfort she needs?
There's a handful amount of organizations out there that are dedicating themselves in fighting the homelessness crisis. We found Handup's mission closest to align with our goals, and Gofundme similar to how we view our product's functionalities.
Using the sticky notes on Miro, we had a productive brainstorming session about the different features we each see our product heading. Shortly after, we got together and sorted our notes out in a matrix.
It was at this point we realized designing different UIs for each user will divide our time and resources, having to split work into two. We decided to focus on designing for Sharon's user UI, but create plans around another UI.
Our aim was to create the app that made donating easy for the user. My goal was to make the product usage convenient and intuitive. These user and task flows are aimed to catch any interaction design issues, and to help create a more seamless interaction by focusing on fewer, more effective, steps.
Complex task flow to show all basic steps in the app.
Flow chart to map out user's journey, and also serve as our usability test's task list.
After receiving the "ok" from the wireframing team, I made sure to highlight and polish consistent actions and interactions between the lo-fi frames, and prepare it for a usability test.
After designing for mobile, we wanted to make a minimum viable web product to trial for our apps responsiveness.
• Empathy is at the very core of this project (and every project to come). It was frustrating to slowly realize we could only design for one side of the UI (user-side), and only draw assumptions for the other (member-side), due to time and feasibility constraints. These were shortcomings we had to realize and learn from.
• Since the team mostly operated on very similar roles, clashes in decisions were expected. Transparency was within our best and common interests, so explaining our choices, driving them from research, and soliciting honest feedback with one another were necessary.
• Because we thought to tackle a complex societal problem with no one solution, we overextended on necessary ideas, only to be met with constraints and limitations. Only when we drove our design decisions with user research did we find what features and functions our product really needed.
• Expand on webpage version for desktop users and create a landing page.
• Create a second member-side interface for the "members/social workers/orgs", creating UI for the other side of users.
• Explore the donation options more, such as defining the "goodiebox" and implement a "giftcard" feature for better usability and more secure transactions.
• More "campaign" creation options to be inclusive for more needs (new laptop, professional clothes, phone charger, etc.).
What started out as a thoughtful idea by wide-eyed designers, to make a simple donation app, entailed more beyond our expectations. We discovered feasibility constraints and limitations, stumbled on vast options, and learned to find compromise between usability and value. It was a challenging, yet humbling, process that I'm grateful to have grown from.
Last but not least, thank you for reading! 🤗
