Founder: "Oops I left the design process behind… Can you help?"
Seearound.me is an app that lets you see and share what’s happening near you, by location. You can find out about new/closing restaurants and businesses, local events, crime and safety, road closures, or anything else local that could be occurring near you.
In its beginnings, the app started as a side project motivated solely by the founder’s personal need. It was built piece-by-piece from an engineering perspective, leaving the design process aside.
After some time, the founder realized important things, such as user activation, retention, and GROWTH, were being affected by the lack of good design. My team was brought in to help re-think the app from a more integral, experience-centered perspective, and give a voice to the users. For this project, I led a team of 6 designers.
Approach
User research
The first step was to understand: “who is our user?”
We started the research process broadly by doing surveys, reaching out to as many people as we could, to understand how people were currently finding their local news and if there was a need for such an app.
Each interviewee is represented by a different color.
The process proceeded with detailed interviews of current users, and we synthesized all our findings through affinity mapping. This helped us to identify the potential new app users and create a persona to represent this average user, which we then used going forward, always keeping in mind throughout the design process for whom we were designing.
We used guerrilla usability testing to surface the major pain-points throughout the Seearound.me app, and these were our findings:
1. Very confusing onboarding flow and visuals;
2. Outdated information;
3. Map and list view have confusing interactions;
4. Problems filtering features.
Priority was given to the onboarding process as it was generating a lot of frustration to new users.
Onboarding + design system
Our strategy started by reviewing the value proposition and the categories the app was offering.
We created a task flow for the onboarding process, and I facilitated multiple brainstorming sessions where the team came up with different ideas that were narrowed down through user validation and feedback sessions with the founder.
During the different iterations, changes were made on iconography, copy, typography, color scheme, and app image, among others. We created the app's first design system that would be the stepping stone for future improvements.
Validation
In our validation testing, we found that users (1) thought the onboarding process was enjoyable (not frustrating), (2) understood the value proposition, (3) identified the main categories through icons, and (4) were aware that they could share information on the platform.
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