During the infamous lockdown, I worked on the branding for a 'brand shop', formed with a friend of mine (a side hustle really). The look for the UI was based on building blocks (as a metaphor for brand building) using shapes that contained the type and images. It became an exercise in rather bad UX and how not to design a website. Looks kind of pretty though and I learned plenty!
Brief:
How can we help city communities overcome barriers to accessing green spaces and improve connections to green spaces in the city centre and beyond, through digital means?
Process:
As a team we ripped the brief to clarify what we knew, what we thought we knew and what we didn’t know to help us understand our knowledge gaps and therefore where our research opportunities could be. Our aim was to discover insights from qualitative research, by creating a group of questions to ask different groups of people from urban community leaders to city dwellers either by zoom or on the street.
The information we received were plentiful, therefore by synthesising the data and using mapping techniques two key insights emerged relating to motivations and barriers; People who visited green spaces often had a strong motivator, dog walkers for example yet an underlying barrier became apparent for women who cited safety issues when visiting green spaces.
We used these insights to form our HMW statement in order to have a starting point for ideation. Using de Bono’s Six Hats and Crazy 8 creativity techniques we produced a plethora of ideas so we could then sketch out our individual favourite concept before presenting them back to the group. From here we discussed and voted on our favourite aspects of everyone's ideas and converged on a theme around ‘community’. We prototyped and tested a mini-community idea called Sisterhood on a rather wet Sunday using a facebook event page with one participant! This helped us to realise that although creating a community could work, it would require time and different levels of investment. Also there were plenty of communities already out there, therefore we shifted our strategy.
Solution:
Our solution, Trusted Spaces, is a digital platform that would connect The National Trust to local existing community groups and potential participants. Therefore participants could attend events curated by different community organisations hosted at National Trust green spaces which are safe and inclusive. One of our team members described Trusted Spaces as an aggregator, although I liked to think of it as something between WeWork and Airbnb, owned and operated by the National Trust helping them to open up their green spaces to a more diverse audience.
Tools:
user interviews / immersive visits / synthesising / six hats / crazy 8 / check in & check outs / team reflections / team feedback / mapping / prototyping
My responsibilities:
design research / user interviews / facilitation / branding / pitching / pitch narrative
Team members:
Bruna Rondon - Digital Marketing Manager
Clara Borenson - Social Media Manager
Siddhi Gawade - Lead UX Designer
Johana Granstrom - UX Designer
Oliver Holt - Lead Motion Designer
