Town of Morrisville Mobile Application
AgreeYa Solutions - UI/UX Designer
Summary:
A month after I started working at AgreeYa, my team was tasked with creating a Statement of Work in order to win a discovery-centered contract with the North Carolinian Town of Morrisville. My responsibility during the SOW was to provide a time estimate for my team, based off data gathered from past projects. AgreeYa won the contract, which meant my team would be in charge of discovering requirements & designing an application that would adhere to both resident & stakeholder requirements.
As this project was fairly blue-sky, we wanted to make sure that we were thorough with our research and requirements gathering so that we could make the app as user-centered as possible. This resulted in 2 public surveys, 19 user interviews, 6 stakeholder meetings, and consistent rapid-prototype testing.
Surveys
We deployed 2 separate surveys, one during a July 4th town celebration and another via social media. There were a total of 100 responses, which provided us a lot of preliminary data as well as contact information for around 50 residents that were interested in participating in user interviews. This high sign-up rate surprised us as we only expected a 25% sign up rate. The high amounts of participation got us excited to proceed with user interviews.
My responsibilities included generating questions as well as analyzing the survey data.
Preliminary User Interviews
The primary purpose of our user interviews was to establish the needs of the residents of Morrisville. In order to accomplish this, we wanted to design a user interview methodology that was methodical but efficient, since we wanted to get as much information as possible from the participants without wasting their time.
We decided to proceed with a semi structured interview style in order to allow the resident to provide as much nuance as possible. For this semi structured approach we included questions that were meant lead the user towards talking about their needs for the application. After a few establishing questions, the resident was able to expand on any part of the application that they deemed necessary.
Our conversations with Morrisville residents highlighted problems that we could fix within the app. For example, some senior residents mentioned that at the time there was no easy way to access information about the town’s transportation services. Although that information was on the town’s website, it was inaccessible because it was buried under a few pages.
This was a common theme: the town had integrated a lot of technology but it was fragmented across various webpages. For example, the town website had a webpage that displayed the availability of tennis and basketball courts around the town using smart sensors. However, this page was harder to find and didn't match the branding and styling of the town's website.
My role during this part of the process was to create the questions, lead some of the interviews, and analyze the data.
Stakeholder Meetings
The Stakeholder meetings were a lot more informational since they had specific requirements that they had decided on prior to our meetings. Some meetings were explorative but for the most part it seemed that most of the stakeholders had specific asks, rather than generalized problems.
We met with three separate stakeholder groups: the city council, the smart city steering committee (resident-led board dedicated towards towards developing smart city initiatives and supporting technology innovation), and a few heads of their departments (firefighters, police, parks & rec, etc). We were able to incorporate most of the features they wanted, but some were overly ambitious for what was possible within our scope. However, we made sure to write down all requirements to make sure we didn't miss anything crucial.
My responsibility included presenting the information we had gathered from residents and learning about additional requirements.
Card Sorting
The data from the surveys, preliminary user interviews, and stakeholder meetings was compiled into a list of features. Now we had the difficult task of organizing and prioritizing the features into something we could start designing.
Our approach to this was to hold card sorting sessions with residents as well as a few stakeholders. We arranged the cards on a Figjam board and asked users to arrange the cards into groups as they saw fit. They were also able to add cards for any features they believed were missing. After they arranged the cards, users were asked to name each group and explain why they grouped those cards together. Most residents were able to respond and elaborate on their ideas quickly but some required follow up questions. Finally, users were asked to go through each grouping and highlight the most important cards/features.
This activity helped us get a larger understanding of the wants and needs of each future user. We were able to compile our ideas and develop a concise list of features to include in our designs.
I led half of the card sorting interviews and helped with data analysis.
Example Card Sorting Activity
Designs
We finally had a list of features for the app as well as a direction to head in, which allowed us to start the design phase of the project. One of the main conclusions of our research was that users seemed to want a map centric application that would provide access to all of the smart city features (court availability, transportation information, RSVP for community/fitness related events, etc). Therefore we decided to start with the map area since that would be the "home" page.
The map was envisioned as a place where residents would be able to get more information about the town and view/report incidents. Since we wanted to perform rapid-prototype testing we decided to only complete a basic wireframe and then dive directly into medium-fidelity designs (pictures and colors included but only to provide users a basic understanding of the final design). This allowed us to quickly display our ideas to our users without needing to overdevelop any of the ideas.
I was solely in charge of the map, reservations, incident reporting, and calendar designs/prototypes and helped my colleagues with the rest of the pages.
Rapid-Prototype Testing
We performed rapid-prototype testing for around 2-3 weeks in order to finalize the general features and make sure that we weren't missing anything that was key to the user experience. In this testing we found that users seemed to generally like the prototypes we had created for them, offering feedback for some of the details/interactions.
For example, during the initial set of user interviews, my UX team interviewed an elderly woman that was interested in having the town buses on the map so that she could get around town easier. We spoke to her again to gather feedback on the prototypes and she told us that she wanted detailed information readily available as well as a way to contact the shuttle service that the town was planning on integrating. This allowed us to service the needs of the residents in a better way, since they were involved in the process the whole time.
During rapid prototype testing, I put together all of the prototypes and noted all the changes we needed to for a more user friendly app.
Final Designs
Our final designs are something that I am very proud of since I was part of the user interview, card sorting, and rapid prototyping teams and completed the majority of the designs that were produced for this project.
Below are the final designs, the main screen being a map screen with incidents, important landmarks, and transportation routes.
Newsfeed
Map
Map - Expanded
Calendar
Event Details
Incident Report
Park Details
Bus Reservation
Next Steps:
After we completed the final designs and buttoned everything up, the business team started creating a roadmap for developing this project
Two weeks later we presented the designs and roadmap to the client, which resulted in nothing but positive feedback. Our developer team is now coding the application, targeting release in a few months.
Since the app was made to help the residents of Morrisville as much as possible with their day-to-day activities, I hope to see that residents are positively impacted by the work we did. It will service around 32,000 residents as well as some additional people that may live in the surrounding areas or use Morrisville amenities.