Prototype for HomieOut
Donating in a Safe Way!
For our final project, we wanted to create a solution to help solve the problems that we idenitifed during our brainstorming ideation group. Our main goal is:
Find a solution to safely and easily help your local homeless population
The main questions we asked during brainstorming were:
- How might we help the homeless get jobs?
- How might we safely aid the homeless people?
- How might we utlize public resources for awareness?
- How might we encourage people to donate to the homeless?
- How might we create empathy towards the homeless?
- How might we repurpose empty spaces?
We then selected five ideas, and landed on combining two of the ideas together. The two we looked at combining were QR Code to help with donations and incentives to donate (tax benefits).
From their we decided on which tool we would like to be using, and landed on Figma becuase of its colloborative enviroment and decided that we would 100% be designing an app.
We explored the idea more and went back to our goal of creating an enivorment that is safe for users to donate too and realizaed the QR code doesn’t achieve that. The user would have to go up close to the homeless person to donate — so instead we thoguht it’d be better to have the app based off geolocation. A homeless person goes the app, writes up their story and creates a profile. People in the area can then find a map with people near by that they can read about and donate to them to help achieve a certain goal.
During our research we found that of homeless people had access to andriod phones, by the government and would acess wifi via hotspots. So based off that research we made the assumption that they had access to phones to design this app.
Our group moved on to creating user flows to lock in the experience for the app. We focused on an MVP verison, and designed for one use case keeping in mind our primary persona the doner. Below you’ll see we kept the sign up flow to be optional and had our focus on finding the homeless person and donating to one.
From their we discussed, typography, colors and UI kits for the app.
For typography we decided to go with Poppins. Below is the typography in caps and lowercase.
As for colors we know we wanted to use a red since that was used by Salvation Army, or for different companies that help with aid.We looked up the what red meant and read that it creates a emotion and feeling of urgency or sense of danger and that would work perfectly fitting for the mission. We then used colors.io to figure out a color palatte.
For the UI kit we decided to go with pegaus and below are some screenshots of the UI kit.
We then started designing and created multiple iterations for the sign up flow, and final came up with the final design portotype.
As for next steps we created a list of questions we want to ask from the class to get feedback on:
- What approach does everyone think would be the best? The way it is currently designed or the QR scan interaction we initially thought off
- By not being able to see the homeless individual, would this cause a decrease or increase in conversation from the donator’s perspective?
- From a scale from 1–5, do you trust to use this application themselves? 1 would be absolute not and 5 being most definitely.
- From a scale from 1–5, how confident do people see this app solving Carla’s problem? 1 would be absolute not and 5 being most definitely.
- Are there any additional features that you think we should include in our app?
Next Steps
For next steps for this project I would focus on going out and doing some quick rapid testing and continue to build out the designs for the seondary persona. I think the idea will continue to change and I’m excited to see how it turns out.
Final Thoughts
Overall I’m really happy with the way the app and the deisgns turned out, I wish we had more time to think out both persona’s flows and create a full experience for HomieOut.