Local

A mobile app to spotlight local small businesses, encourage community support, and help neighborhoods thrive together during and beyond the challenges of the pandemic.

Role
Research & Design

Tools
Adobe XD, Miro

A collage of five smartphone screens showing different app interfaces: the first screen displays a registration page with fields for email and password; the second screen shows a map with location pins, a search bar, and categories like restaurant and grocery; the third screen features a listing for a pizza restaurant with menu items such as cheese pizza, pepperoni pizza, baked chicken wings, and veggie plate; the fourth screen displays environmental data points like CO2 emissions, trees saved, and a drawing of a tree with two people underneath; the fifth screen illustrates a person shaping dough for pizza with a product list and chat messages.

When was the last time you supported a local business?

Small businesses always had a hard enough time competing with big brands. When the pandemic hit, many local businesses were forced to close down as a result of not being able to sustain themselves.

To support our communities, we have to stand together and help each other. My teammate and I designed Local, an app that promotes small businesses in the area while tightening the bond of our neighborhood. I worked on the UX while she focuses on the UI.

Understanding the User

User Interviews

We conducted a small user research by asking what people think about small businesses around their area. I live in Kalamazoo, MI while my teammate lives in San Francisco, CA so using this approach helped us get different perspectives in terms of culture and location.

Our research discoveries:

  • 5/10 users thought of restaurants ran by families. Others thought of sustainability items and handmade jewelry when first asked about small businesses.

  • 8/10 users would recommend local restaurants to tourists or friends.

  • 6/10 users think that local businesses are more expensive.

  • 8/10 users know about their neighborhood businesses through word of mouth.

User Persona

We found that although our target users can reach to older communities, it is mainly the early-20s to mid-30s users who are constantly exploring new environments.

That said, we created a user persona to accurately represent our users.

I present, Steven:

Steven is a busy professional new to the city who needs a simple way to look for local gems because he wants to explore and bring his wife on a date!

User Journey

I created a user journey for Steven to further understand what he would do while using our app.

The goal: Steven wants to taste test a local business before bringing his wife on the weekend.

A step-by-step guide on how to use a mobile app for a service, including download, account creation, browsing options, viewing details, and placing an order, organized in a table with sections on task lists, feelings, and improvement opportunities.

User journey to order an item from Local

Brainstorming ideas

Value Proposition

Before coming up with solutions, I wanted to brainstorm some features my app can have that’ll make a user go “Wow, I want to have this!”.

We identified five categories of our product value: Cost, Convenience, Contentment, Reliability, and Accessibility.

How our app stands out from others

Competitive Analysis

To think about how to stand out from other similar apps, I completed a simple competitive analysis. Tripadvisor, Yelp, and Google maps came to mind when thinking about finding local spots.

Comparison between TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google maps

Summary:

I found that although these apps do show some local gems, it was not emphasized. Hence, many local businesses were mixed and lost with popular go-to areas like McDonald’s.

This showed me that Local would be unique in the market for focusing entirely on local businesses.

Brainstorm —> Design

Screen Flow

After deciding the features we wish to implement, I created a screen flow to visualize a clear direction and flow of our app. This helped us remember small actions like having a back button on some pages.

Local navigation

Sketches / Paper Prototype

Here comes my favorite part of UX Design! Once we establish our app flow, I proceeded to sketch small cutouts of the interaction. This provides an imitation of a phone screen and may also be used as a paper prototype.

My paper prototype

Wireframing

Finally, we designed our digital prototype in Adobe XD. Because of the steps done in sketching , our prototyping phase was a really easy-going process.

First, I created a low-fidelity wireframe which includes some formatting and simple interactions:

My lo-fi protoype

Turning a rock into a diamond

High-fidelity Prototype

Once my partner and I agreed on how it looks like, we worked on refining the details.

Below is our final prototype:

My hi-fi prototype

Interact with my Adobe XD prototype.

Check out my LinkedIn post to watch my video.

My Favorite part:

Although I designed the different pages of this app, my favorite part has to be the impact page.

A user can navigate to their impact page and see how much they have contributed to the community. These include families helped, money saved, and environment conserved.

Takeaways

  • Don’t assume the problem. Always do user research to understand various perspectives of a situation. What you think the problem is may not be a contributing factor at all.

  • Collaboration is key. I am very grateful to have my partner, Nina, working on this project with me. Together, we decided that I will focus more on the UX and she the UI.

  • The process is what makes the product. In other words, don’t rush into a situation. Going through all those steps have helped us get a clear image of what we should do and what we want to do.

Final Thoughts

This was a really big achievement for me. Not because I won a prize (it was from a trivia question!), but because I finally saw my efforts learning about UX being implemented into this project. Weirdly enough, I also felt joy when I realized that some methods I have been using were wrong all along.

At the end of the day, I knew I was advancing and I know that it is because of the endless effort I put into learning.