The Importance of Collaboration
This project helped sharpen my abilities in collaborating and co-ordinating responsibilities within a team, especially when ensuring all members were on the same page regarding design decisions. Working in a team also meant that workflow was much more streamlined, as more minds are involved in the decision-making and feedback/iteration process.
Integrating Research into Design
I found the process of integrating research insights into design to be invaluable. While my role was UI Design, I participated in various aspects of the research process to solidify and support my design decisions. Being an active participant in the research process helped uncover topics I lacked awareness of. Investing myself into the problem I was designing for fuelled my passion for this project, and also instilled confidence into my designs.
Understanding Brand Values
Conceptualizing omo’s brand identity reinforced the importance of envisioning a design direction to create a memorable user experience. Using research insights to inform omo’s brand values allowed me to make intentional design choices, including the voice, colour palette, and typography for omo.
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A discover page where users receive personalized recommendations and an extensive filtering system that best tailors towards their needs.
An interactive map that features top-rated locations based on its success in facilitating a third place.
A favourites tab that allows for users to save their most notable locations.
Incentives for businesses when they qualify as a third place through a boost in engagement with users.
Our goal of ensuring that third places are more accessible to users also involves understanding what makes them appealing or motivating for various demographics, the impact of third places on these users, and how we can use technology as a medium to help third places thrive. To help specify the scope of our research, we identified the following questions:
01
What physical and environmental attributes make third places appealing to different demographics?
02
In what ways do third places impact the mental and emotional well-being of individuals?
03
What are the user’s primary motivations to visit third places?
04
How can we use technology to foster third places?
Our team then devised a plan consisting of identifying converging points from the research conducted, understanding our user demographics and motivations, mapping out the information architecture of our mobile app, and lastly decide on our design direction. Here are some key insights derived from our user survey consisting of 35 participants:
80%
63%
86%
Understanding Our Audience
Several personas were developed with omo’s target audience in mind, which aided in providing a more in-depth understanding of our users. The majority of survey participants ranged from gen z to millennial, which were reflected in the personas created.
Structuring Navigation
To demonstrate how our users may interact with the app, we mapped a user flow for Fatima, who is looking for a nearby ramen place. This scenario provided a greater understanding of how our users may potentially operate our app to locate a third place that matches their needs.
Afterward, our team formed a sitemap to better understand the structure of the app and how each component will be linked with one another, especially in relation to the categorization of various filters that the user would interact with.
Our design direction incorporated several research insights, such as how individuals value authenticity and relaxation when it comes to third places. Thus, I pinpointed 3 key brand values that best reflected omo: friendly, personable, and comfortable. The added shapes reflected the organic authenticity of the brand.
Low-fidelity Wireframes
To visualize the foundational structure of the app, low-fidelity wireframes were sketched, and then tested using the Guerrilla Usability Test methodology on paper prototypes.
Participants found the process to be intuitive with minimal feedback provided, solidifying the core functionality of the app and providing validation prior to moving forward with more developed wireframes.
Using omo’s branding guidelines, the app was brought to life. Colour palettes, typography, and images were carefully selected to create a polished, functioning prototype.
Mid-fidelity Wireframes
After the low-fidelity wireframe was tested, the layout was further refined in the mid-fidelity phase, establishing clearer visual hierarchy and providing additional context to UI components.
