Design

Where do you go to find social services in your area? Chances are you perform a quick internet search and go from there. The issue, however, is that a broad internet search rarely yields the type of information you’re looking for since many nonprofits and NGOs don’t have all their information publicly available, or are lacking up to date info. That’s where “Nearby” comes in! During TechLabs Berlin’s 4 month tech bootcamp, I collaborated with a team of students, including one web developer, one data scientist, and one user experience designer (myself) to create our own social service locator, aptly named “Nearby.”

As the UX designer on the team, I developed a survey, gathered responses, and performed some informal interviews with social workers to get some more concrete data and direction. From the results, we learned that:

• Respondents’ top 3 social services were – women’s health/support, education support/local libraries, mental health services * Note – data slightly skewed because 95% of respondents identified as women
• Majority of respondents, 86.4%, perform a general internet search when seeking local services
• 79.5% use Google Maps to search 90.9% are seeking information about the services offered, 63% are looking for contact info
• 61.4% struggle with relevancy of information, 52.3% struggle with availability of information

These results helped guide our next design decisions. Once we began to understand our data limitations, we shifted our focus to be less on the mapping feature and more on the search feature. How people search and access the right information was utmost priority. We also used the survey info to create a few different personas. These also helped to dictate our design choices. After creating some initial designs based on data and personas, and explored user flow, I next translated the designs on to Figma. Throughout the process, we kept our focus on making information accessible, comprehensive, and relevant.