Helping Hands

An app that connects neighbours when one needs a little help. This app was designed with the help of cards from the Design for Happiness Deck from the Delft Institute.

Step 1

To find direction for this project, I asked a friend of mine to select cards from the Design for Happiness Deck; one card from the Emotions section, one from the Human goals section, and four from the Virtues section. She chose cards that spoke to her character.

From here, I brainstormed ideas for applications that could encompass these qualities. In discussions with this friend and others, I decided to create an app to be used in communities to facilitate reciprocal interactions for goods and/or services.

Step 2

User interviews with my friends and family allowed me to create an empathy map to help organize their thoughts and my observations. This allowed me to create general personas for the different types of people who may use this application.

Interview questions

  1. What are some of the biggest challenges you have with connecting to your community?

  2. How important is building social connections for you as a neighbour?

  3. Do you currently receive any kind of support from your neighbours? If so, what kind of support (e.g. they have an extra house key, they pick up your packages, shovel your bit of the sidewalk, etc.)?

  4. Are you apart of any community groups or organizations?

  5. How do you prefer to communicate with your neighbours? What channels do you use most frequently (e.g. text, social media, email, in person)?

  6. What motivates you to help your neighbours or community? Any specific situations you’re particularly interested in?

  7. Are their barriers stopping you from helping your neighbours? If so, what are they?

  8. What kinds of safeguards or mechanisms would you want in place to ensure a safe and trustworthy experience?

  9. What kind of features would you want to see in an app that facilitates neighborly help?

Persona 1: Eve, 22, Student

Bio

Eve is a Marketing Major who finds joy in spending time with animals and laughing with friends. She is a self proclaimed "sushiholic," and is kind, creative, and wants to positively impact the world through her actions.

Goals

  • Meet new dogs

  • Feel productive and fulfilled in free time

  • Have an excuse to get out of the house

  • Have a community of people she can call on if she needs help

Pain points

  • Doesn’t know where to start with meeting new people in her neighbourhood.

  • There aren't many ways to connect with her community

  • Is shy meeting new people without knowing what their common ground is

Persona 2: George, 74, Retired

Bio

George is a retiree who finds joy in spending time with his family, pets, and sitting in the warm sun on his porch. He's an amateur baker (although his grandchildren would say he makes the best desserts ever), and is friendly, approachable, and likes to be involved in his community.

Goals

  • Stay socially active in his community

  • Meet new people

  • Leave a positive impact on the people around him

  • Be a good role model to his grandchildren

Pain points

  • Struggles to find people who live close that can help with simple tasks

  • Feels isolated and disconnected from most of the neighbourhood

  • Can be nervous to ask the young people in the neighbourhood for help

Step 3

First, I roughly sketched out some general frame ideas and then started to build a user flow and a wireframe. My goal was to keep the interface simple, to try to stay under three taps for any one objective, and to not force older users to create new neuro-pathways. Considering the market for this app ranges from young adult to senior, I wanted to make sure that the interface would not cause confusion or frustration. This was specifically important for the navigation bar. Choosing to make all five navigation icons familiar shapes and putting them in familiar places will lower the onboarding learning curve for new users.

Step 4

Once the style guide was complete, I started on the final prototype. Here are some screens from the prototype using Eve as an example.

Home

The home page is where Eve can see the latest and still active asks. Eve can choose between viewing all the asks in her set area, or only view active asks posted by people in her Circle.

Each ask shows the poster’s name, how far away they are, a subject line, and the first line of their ask. When tapped, the ask expands to show the poster’s whole ask. Three buttons give Eve the option to accept the task, message the poster, or forward the ask to someone else who could help.

In this case, Eve tapped the Accept button becuase Josh was offering cookies as compensation!

Map and Messages

Eve can also search for posts by map. Her area is set to 0-5km, so she only sees posts within that area. We can see that Eve decided to message Peter to ask if he still had leftovers. Thankfully Peter did, and now Eve doesn’t have to cook tonight. Yay for Eve!

Post

The centre button on the navigation bar is the “Add Post” button. This is where users can write their asks, select when the post expires, and choose if everyone can see it, or only the people in their circle. We can see here that Eve is writing a post, changing the “Who can help?” option to “My Circle” and changing the date. Hopefully someone takes that bottle of red off her hands!

Profile

On her profile page, Eve can see all the posts she’s helped with, and everything she has posted. She can also change her settings, like the area radius of posts that will be shown to her, can edit who is in her Circle, and her notification settings. Eve can also edit her personal information.

Details

Future considerations

A possible feature that could be added to the app is gamification. Adding awards or badges that users could collect by helping others would entice users to accept more posts. This could also lead to a wider community network and allow users to meet more people, helping to greater achieve one of the goals of the app.