— ROLE
Facilitate Design Sprint
Overlook UX Design
Secondary Research
Wireframing
Branding
Slide Deck
— TOOLS
Figma
— TIMELINE
10/15 – 10/17/2021
OVERVIEW
Because of the pandemic, homelessness has increased to 45% over summer 2021 and many reside in New York’s underground subways, based on an article from New York Post. The increase in unsheltered people are tied to increasing the insanitary New York environment, crime rates, and the congested streets. Many New Yorkers are also left uncomfortable and uneasy in the subways. Seeing the social and economic problems within their state worsening displayed in front of them has New Yorkers lost hope in their government and state. How can my team and I bring back hope to New York? Focusing on uplifting the New York community and encouraging them to help each other amidst the pandemic, my team and I created a mobile app that enables users to offer a helping hand to unsheltered people in various ways to rebuild the New York community.
OBJECTIVE
Within 30 hours, my team and I had to innovate a platform that tackles New York’s most pressing social and economic issues ranging from the congested New York streets, reducing the booming house rates, and minimizing unemployment for New York’s population. For my team’s mobile platform, we specifically chose to reduce New York’s homelessness.
SOLUTION
Helping Hands is a gamified mobile platform for the New York public to offer and request help for their fellow unsheltered friends on their own free time, allowing the unsheltered people access to various resources. The New York public can earn experience points for directly or indirectly helping (because any kind of help is help for the unsheltered people) and completing their daily challenges. The daily challenges encourage the New York public to complete an act of kindness a day.
ACCOMPLISHED OUTCOME
Having experience in other hackathons as purely a designer, I led my team for the first time as a change. I coordinated our schedules and worked around our time differences to ensure we had a working prototype and solid presentation for the judges under 30 hours.
Working efficiently with constant communication and multiple iterations, my team and I created a straightforward mobile interface that directly and passively engages two audiences (the mobile users and unsheltered people). We ultimately increased the accessibility of our platform by combining our brainstormed solutions. On the final hackathon day, my team and I won the Best Socioeconomic Hack!
KEY RESEARCH INSIGHT:
AN OVERWHELMING AMOUNT OF HOMELESSNESS IN NEW YORK
To start off, my team and I researched generally what New York’s top problems are in 2021 as all of us are unfamiliar with the state we have never been to. Among our compiled research, we discovered that New York was struggling with rising unemployment, rising crime rates, congested streets leading to mass transportation issues, soaring housing rents, inaccessible mental health resources, and all of these issues have intensified with the pandemic. However, these issues are tied back to one major issue in New York, an increase in unsheltered people.
Job loss, eviction, and hazardous housing conditions intensified during the pandemic and triggered the increase in unsheltered people. Many of them reside in underground subways and other public places that leaves many New Yorkers feeling uneasy with the unsanitary conditions. According to the New York Post, “New Yorkers fear catching COVID-19 or being assaulted or harassed by someone who is not wearing a mask, likely not vaccinated, and often evidences mental and physical health problems.” The social and economic crisis displayed in front of the New Yorkers’ eyes daily drained their hope in brightening New York’s streets and improving the community.
HOW MIGHT WE…
With our compiled research in mind, I facilitated a timed design sprint for my team to brain dump all their ideas on our Figjam. I wanted to be sure that we were all on the same page and guide ourselves to a clear, unique design solution.
Through group voting and stimulating design discussions, my team and I worked our design brains to further dissect New York’s homelessness issue and how might we:
Increase accessibility for the unsheltered people?
Provide recovery for the unsheltered people through technology?
Encourage the New York public to support the unsheltered people?
Incentivize the New York people to help unsheltered people?
Foster the New York community to be compassionate and hopeful again?
Establish a genuine sense of connection within the New York community?
FEATURES OF OUR DESIGN SOLUTION
1. A quest to offer help
Users can directly offer help to the unsheltered by looking through quests (in-app term for requests) that others have created in general locations of New York. When a user offers their help, they will first be asked to choose in which category their donations fall into. After finishing the quest, users will be rewarded with experience points.
2. Call on your comrades
See an unsheltered person in need and don’t have the time to directly help? Users can still help by filling out a quick request form to notify in-app users. These request forms will turn into quests! Allow your New York friends to take on these quests and help our unsheltered friends! Users will receive experience points for submitting a request as well!
3. Complete daily challenges
To encourage users to help their fellow unsheltered community every day, our platform offers additional rewards special badges that users can display on their profile.
FULL INTERFACE FLOW
CHALLENGES
While flushing out our designs, I had asked my friends and the hackathon’s mentors for a third-person perspective of what they think of our product idea. The challenges we had to ponder over are:
“How can we keep the vulnerable unsheltered community safer?” We originally had the idea of users sending in the specific location of one specific unsheltered individual. However, my peers have raised the concern of the unsheltered individual to be at risk of human trafficking and policing. Therefore, my team focused on providing aid to the general unsheltered group in a general location.
My team and I had trouble with creating a clear home screen that balances gamifying aspects and education. We created a total of 21 iterations for the home screen alone! Not only did we want to hook our user in the beginning, but we also wanted to inspire and relay the purpose of creating Helping Hands.
MY HOPES FOR HELPING HANDS
Before building Helping Hands, my dream and goal is to always spread goodness in the world to allow people to rely on each other. I hope Helping Hands motivates the New York community to help unsheltered friends as well as acknowledging and emphasizing with them. I want the New York community to experience a sense of fulfillment when helping someone in need. I want Helping Hands to help the New York community build a genuine altruistic friendship!
Perhaps this app can initiate a domino effect to create a positive impact in all aspects of New York from improving the environment’s sanitation to better mental health access to less congestion on the New York streets. I want to reignite the New York community’s hope that changes can be made, a positive impact can be created, and that it can all start with them!
WHAT I LEARNED
As project lead, I wish to be more firm in my decisions and words for more efficient work. I should also delegate tasks to my teammates and set a goal for each of us before coming together for a meeting, especially since we are working in different time zones. I find myself being so immersed in my work that I forget to check in with my teammates. Rather than focusing solely on myself and what I am doing, I should check in with others to keep track of progress and motivate my teammates along the way.
This project, Helping Hands, holds a special place in my heart because it is my first project that I led completely on my own. It was my first time facilitating a design sprint. It was my first time having teammates rely on me for my final decision. I was doubtful of myself in my previous projects and I was fed up with that part of myself. So, I pushed myself to experiment with a new role on the team. I wanted to venture in the uncomfortable environment to test what I learned from previous projects and to test myself as a person. I am happy I did and I am grateful for having teammates that trust me.
TRY IT OUT YOURSELF!
Click the button below to check out the prototype of the app
