Challenge

Create and design a mobile app for social change

Overview

(Live)Safe is an iOS app dedicated providing instant resources to those who are experiencing housing instability and need access to shelter, food, or medical attention. This app is being created for my Interactive Media Design senior capstone project at The University of Washington which requires us to tackle a social justice issue that is currently presenting and create high-fidelity prototype solution.

Our current mission with this app is to create a database that provides an easy access to food, shelter, and medical attention with the help of multiple non-profit organizations here in Seattle, WA. To help accomplish this, we are working with stakeholders and experts on the field, including the organization YouthCare and a field lead for the Northwest Leaders in Behavioral Health Program, Charlotte Sanders, who is also a teaching associate at The University of Washington, serving as the field lead for the School’s newly created Northwest Leaders in Behavioral Health Program. Sanders has been involved in social services for more than 22 years, primarily serving Seattle youth and young adults in different homeless service settings and capacities, ranging from direct service, program management and advocacy. 

Identifying the Problem

Once my group, which consists of Eddie Peinado, Natasha Page, and Garrett Borbe, figured out the general direction we wanted to go towards, we started reaching out to nearby non-profit organizations and experts in the field. We contacted about five organizations but only three were interested in working with us. These organizations are: YMCA, YouthCare, and UW Faculty via Charlotte Sanders who works for YouthClinic. After talking to all of them we decided to go forward with Charlotte Sanders as our main stakeholder and have Craig Gibson from the YMCA has our secondary stakeholder.

Research

First I met with Craig Gibson who is a volunteer at YouthCare and their mission is to build “confidence and self-sufficiency for homeless youth by providing a continuum of care that includes outreach, basic services, emergency shelter, housing, counseling, education, and employment training” (About YouthCare). His organization deals with homeless youth and homeless LGBTQ in the greater Seattle area.

Next, I met up with Charlotte Sanders Sanders who has been involved in social services for more than 22 years, serving Seattle youth and young adults in different homeless settings. This can range from direct service, program management and advocacy. In addition to be a teaching associate at University of Washington Social Science department, she works with NeighborCare Health's Homeless Youth Clinic as a youth clinic manager and onsite social worker.

Personas

Early Design Process

Throughout the course of this project, I went through different iterations of design of the app from our first stakeholder interview to our second stakeholder interview.

Once I got our paper wireframes completed and showed our stakeholders for feedback, I headed to Sketch to make high fidelity wireframes.

We met up with our main stakeholder, Charlotte Sanders, and showed her our 1.0 and 2.0 prototype. She enjoyed the simplicity look our 1.0 app but advised us to simple it down even more and focus on a few specific helpful features. We went from 7 boxes on the main landing page to 3 then to 4 on the final iOS version; Shelters, Meals, Rest Stops, and Organization Log In. She reminded us that the people who are going to be using this app, don’t have very good user interaction skills, so the simpler, the better. After showing her our 2.0 interactive prototype, she really enjoyed that we narrowed our goals down and simplified.

Prototyping

After countless design interactions, we created interactive prototype on InVision that that best addressed our users wants and needs. Our interviews from stakeholders, personas, and academic journals, have helped out narrow down our primary and secondary users of our mobile app that helps youth experiencing housing instability. If we are able to identity the problems the organization are working on, then we will be able to address those issues in creating the iOS app because our multiple ethnographic interviews, intensive research through academic databases, paper and interactive prototypes, and incorporating extensive team collaboration during this process. Working with Charlotte Sanders has been very beneficial to our project because of the insight she has been able to give us on this rising crisis here in Seattle.

Final Version iOS

We based our iterations according to crucial feedback we got back from the survey we gave our stakeholders at Youthcare, Roots Young Adults Shelter, and Charlotte Sanders from the UW school of social work. Presenting our design and prototypes resulted in overwhelmingly positive feedback from our stakeholders and more specifically from Youthcare when the representative conveyed a huge interest in using this app particularly with homeless youth.  Some things users enjoyed, was our overall aesthetics (Color, font, layout, etc).

More details about our design process can be found below by clicking on Designer's Log entres .