Hidden Treasures: Developing an Info System for Recreation in the NRV
The Goal
To learn Information Architecture (how information can best be structured to increase findability and usability) through investigation of recreation in the New River Valley in VA. Then design and implement an information system to combat a real problem we uncovered. To begin, the we did research on different kinds of recreation to pull from later.
The Challenge
Before we began brainstorming, our team decided that we wanted to challenge ourselves - which meant choosing a project topic whose audience was NOT like us. In this way, we would have to do extensive user research and not design for ourselves.
The Problem
After combing through group research, we built a morphological box to explore recreational activity mash ups. This revealed that almost all NRV residents experienced difficulties actually finding events that pertained to the recreational categories they were interested in.
Developing our Idea
To start, our group created a rhythm for our design process - setting a meeting agenda, individually tackling the topics beforehand, and then coming together for an 1 hour sketching collaboration. Eventually we decided on an event sharing mobile application where users could ‘subscribe’ to certain event topics, and receive notifications when events tagged with such topics were posted. In addition, users could go into a browse mode where they could generally search through events and have temporary filters by topic to see other subsets of events. In addition, any user could post an event to the platform as well.
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We also decided to tailor our advertising platform to 'small' events. These are events that do not have large advertising efforts - usually because they are very local and come from smaller businesses and groups that do not have the money or network to make their own web advertisements. In addition, these events promote activities that people can do together. Lastly, these events would be free or cost very little and be open to the public.
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We also speculated that the audience for our project would consist of two distinct groups:
Young Professionals
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Attracted to Blacksburg because of its growing technical hub
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Tech savy and present on social media
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New to the area, does not know about events
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A transient population - may move again in a few years
Generational Locals
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Lived in the NRV for generations
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Possibly less tech savy
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Attends events because of word of mouth and habit
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May be unaware of events outside their social circle or county
Information
Flow
Validation Research
Existing Technologies
Our two main competitors were nextthreedays and Facebook. The first failed to serve user needs because it was centered on deals rather than activities, and the second limits users by social circles rather than connecting people based on interests.
Critical Mass
We were unsure whether the NRV had enough small events to sustain an app like we proposed. So we attempted to fill a google calendar with real events that met our criteria for the month of October - which was more than successful.
Interviewing Locals
To confirm our ideas about the NRV, we interviewed several different locals who had been in the valley for years. Through this we learned that most people went to events out of tradition rather than advertisement, and that residents from different counties had negative impressions of one another.
Regional Reports
Through online research, we were able to solidify that the NRV has 2 main audiences - highly transient and young people and generational locals. Most importantly we learned that the small events we wanted to support are actually vital to the NRV's economic and cultural stability
Risks & Feedback
Next, we sat down to have an honest conversation as a group. Earlier, our professor
had mentioned that groups who had specific topics typically created more developed,
interesting and creative projects. Our topic however was pretty broad, but our
research showed a specific need in the NRV we wanted to fill. Thus, though it was a
risk we knew that being passionate about our work would drive us in ways that easily
solved problems could not, and that academia was the appropriate place to
challenge ourselves.
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In addition, we presented our concept design to our peers to receive feedback.
Their first suggestion was to move away from a mobile application platform, because entering event data on a small screen may deter users. We wanted to address this concern, but also maintain mobile functionality to reach people where they would most likely browse events – on the go. Thus, to compromise we added a companion website for event creator features - like adding, editing or monitoring events.
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The second concern from our peers was our ability to vet events. In sitting down to address this problem, we knew that having a dedicated admin team vet all events or creating a complex automated systems to check event credibility was out of the scope of our class. Thus we turned to learning more about user moderating. This brought up two important questions:
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How do users know what is appropriate?
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Promoting of the small event:
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We will set precedent of content expectations by posting events that embody a ‘small’ event for the first month of release
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Creating an account will prompt the user to read a brief explanation of intended event values and agree to our expectations
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Inappropriate Social Behavior:
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Users should already be aware of social media etiquette through other societal and online experiences
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How do we equip users with good moderating tools?
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Combating Inappropriate Behavior:
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Users can flag comments, then mark the kind of abuse that occurred and write a small explanation
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Combating Fake or Unwanted Events:
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Users can report events, then mark why the event forwent our values and write a small explanation
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An administrator will review flags and report requests, if deemed inappropriate they are removed from the application and the involved party receives an email
Click Through Protoype & BluePrints
Where you can see all the individual events you have subscribed to in a list form.
Branding
To name our app, we made a morphological box of nouns and adjective pairs. Most of these described something small but mighty, playing into culture and sustaining real relatable people. When our group started hitting a wall, one teammate shared our concept with an outsider and asked for their ideas. They said that it reminded them of walking through an antique store and finding lots of small hidden treasures. We liked ‘Hidden Treasures’ because it is how we feel about the NRV, and provides a great metaphor for expectations and branding. From there, we established a color scheme that embodied earthy map hues, with a brighter flare. In addition, we incorporated more visual appeal through use of a map-like fun icons and a logo.
Hidden Treasures
Global Navigation:
Home, Search, Notifications, Your Account
Further Research
Before beginning app development, we explored the surrounding NRV area to test our concept against local interests. Mary and Christie started in Pearisburg, visited small shops, collected local advertisements like flyers and talked to locals. Next, they travelled to Pulaski on Main - an organization that encourage patronizing local businesses and town events. Their goal is to restore activity in Pulaski, since the closing of three major factories hurt the town economically and it is no longer the hub of activity that it used to be. Currently, Pulaski on Main uses Facebook to advertise their and other group events.
Andrew and Melanie drove out to Radford and Giles County, and attended a Craft Show in Narrows. Their conversations with vendors revealed the prevalence of word of mouth invitations, how positive feedback motivates first time event attendance, and the importance of knowing about amenities beforehand. Also, vendors had attended craft shows all over the NRV – proving that interest trumps county bias. Furthermore, vendors shared that though county bias exists, it comes out of loyalty to support their home because of the influence on economic and communal stability.
These visits confirmed our earlier research that generational locals know about events because of word of mouth and tradition. In addition, our findings made us tweak our design. We decided to mimic Facebook reporting functionality because of its familiarity and add parking to one of the required fields on event pages. Lastly, we decided to move away from ‘breaking’ county bias. Instead, we aimed to expose people in the NRV to events of their interests from all counties, but also make it easy for users to support their local community using a distance filter.
User Testing
For user testing we decided to make a closed card sort to test whether our groupings and labeling of content made sense. In addition, we also employed an open cart sort with the icons from our application, and then showed the icons in context if users were unable to recognize them. We gathered participants from both of our audience groups and after having them complete the study with the think aloud technique, found that our architecture was mostly intuitive.
However, the home icon, denoted as a treasure chest, and the flag icon brought us trouble. Participant’s guesses for the latter were widely off, even when shown in context. Still, when testing other flagging icons – like an orange ‘!’ triangle, users were still confused by their meaning. For the time being, we went with using the flag, but in red with an accompanying ‘REPORT’ or ‘SPAM’ text.
Developement & Future
After programming for several weeks, our backend is mostly finished, connected to the important features of our website and application, and the application’s user interface is complete. Still, we were not able to deliver all that we had promised. At the beginning of the project, we knew that taking on so much functionality and an unfamiliar audience was a risk. We acknowledge that we were overconfident and took on more than we could handle. However, we feel accomplished having learned a lot about our topic, our audience, and how to deal with technical roadblocks throughout the course of the project.
If given the opportunity to continue this project, we would need to conduct further research and user testing. Particularly, we need a more intuitive presentation for flagging and assurance that our branding is clear and fits in with the user experience. However, for our system to be successful we would also need to spend a lot of time and effort promoting and advertising our app with content creators and managers – starting with our contacts from our visits to the NRV. Next, would come more targeted advertising to both our audiences of young professionals and generational locals.