Research For/By Design: Part III
By: Christopher Kim
Tags: UX Design, UX Research, Workshop, Homelessness, Brainstorming

Background

This post will cover part 3 out of 5 parts of this project. On this part, I have looked back into the research I’ve done so far from the previous 2 parts. From that, I was tasked to pick out the most valuable and salient insights that spoke out that could be more applicable for my stakeholders. As a result, we should have the following

At least 3 different design solutions that my group would prototype

A primary persona

A secondary persona

Tools

The tools used in this project were:

Mural

Google Slides

Ideation/Brainstorming Workshop

To kick start this project, my group and I began by running an ideation/brainstorming workshop. The main goal of this session was to help us generate design solutions and guide us in defining both our primary and secondary personas.

Feel free to view our workshop and persona notes: Click here

Gathering Notes

To start, I’ve gathered all the notes my group gathered from the primary and secondary research that we’ve done in the past 2 parts. Afterward, I started conducting qualitative coding to group the research notes into themes. The various themes were:

Reasons of homelessness

Mistrust with government

Homeless Living

The difficulty of gettings jobs

Charities/Programs

Healthcare Education

Lack of motivations for the homeless community

With the other notes that were collected, I have separated them and put them in the bottom since there were less applicable for what we wanted to create as a prototype.

Goals/Problems

To iterate the purpose of this workshop, we wanted to generate many design solutions based on our research about homelessness. In the first step, we put all the problems that we could discover from our themes from our “Notes” section and grouped similar problems.

Afterward, we wanted how to phrase our problems into “How might we.. ?” We chose to do it this way to help make it easier to understand the problem. It was also able to offer everyone a chance to answer each question in a variety of ways.

Ideation

Next, as a team, we voted on which “How might we…?” we wanted to focus on for our design solutions. Once we could narrow that part down, we’ve started timeboxing ourselves 15 minutes to start ideating various solutions for each “How might we…?”

As a team, we started voting on what we believed would be the best design solution for each problem. Down below, the 5 different design solution has been boxed and highlighted in green.

Down below, I’ve provided the 5 design solutions we wanted to explore and provide more details.

Design Solution #1

Brief Summary: QR scan stickers (like PayRange app) + Social media pages focusing on the homeless

Description: By leveraging phones, we want to help make it more accessible for an individual to learn more about the homeless’s story and have an easier time donating. We envision that this can be accomplished by connecting to the homeless’s smartphone via Bluetooth. Another alternative to being able to connect is if the homeless have a QR code ready.

Design Solution #2

Brief Summary: A job board dedicated to helping convicted homeless and regular homeless get jobs

Description: Based on primary research, we see homeless individuals who are ready and willing to work. However, for some homeless people, one thing that stops them has a criminal record. We want to create a job board geared to helping the homeless population and even those who want to get back on their feet to get jobs.

Design Solution #3

Brief Summary: Partner with restaurants/grocery stores to donate unused food

Description: An app to make it more accessible for the homeless to get food from restaurants or groceries. Generally, we see that restaurants and groceries have to follow a procedure required by most state laws to throw away food before the actual expiration date. We want to leverage that timeframe and help feed the homeless and help the planet by reducing food waste.

Design Solution #4

Brief Summary: Easier access to vocational training and education

Description: We want to create an educational app that helps train the homeless population to be more job-ready. This app aims to help train the homeless individual on the foundations needed for a given trade. Suppose we can get sponsors/donations. In that case, we can even go as far as sponsoring the homeless individual and going through vocational school. In the current economy, we see that there is a high shortage of blue-collar workers. Being able to train more blue-collar workers can help bridge the gap between the supply and demand for blue-collar industries.

Design Solution #5

Brief Summary: Incentives to donate (tax benefits)

Description: This is less of an actual design solution but more of a process, government, and business solution. We want to encourage engagements through incentives for individuals to donate to the homeless. By donating to homeless individuals, they can get incentives such as tax deductions.

Persona Creation

Now that we were to narrow down our problem and potential design solutions. We had enough information to define our primary and secondary persona. To provide a summary

Primary Persona : The individual who is giving to the homeless

: The individual who is giving to the homeless Secondary Persona: The homeless individual receiving money

Primary Persona Definition

We started by listing a few attributes or characteristics such as her age, lifestyle, education, and what she has an interest in and values for our primary persona.

Next, we wanted to define her goals/desires and a few limitations that cause to impede her from achieving her goals.

Lastly, we wanted to create a pattern of behavior for her. When making this, we tried to consider all the information we have provided before, such as her demographic, geographic, psychographic, goals and desire, and limitation data.

Secondary Persona Definition

Next up, we wanted to go through the same process when defining our secondary persona. We started by giving quick background information about her age/lifestyle, education level, and personal interests and values.

In addition, we defined her goals/desires and limitations.

Similarly to primary persona, we created a pattern of behavior based on data that we have previously put in, such as demographic, geographic, psychographic, her goals and desire, and limitation data.

Final Persona

Now that all the notes have been gathered and organized, we were able to produce our primary and secondary persona with their behavior patterns.

Carla Bala (Primary Persona)

Ashley Collins (Secondary Persona)

Scenario

To provide more of a visual experience of what we are trying to create. Our team has created a scenario storyboard to explore our top 5 design solutions further.

Self Reflection

I want to say this is my favorite part of the design process where I would get with a team and start ideating different solutions. The reason being, it allows us to think of solutions that make an impact on the problem at hand. Also, it helps embrace creative thinking not only to consider business value but our customer values.

What would I have done differently?

If I had more time, I would have loved a chance to be more specific in defining more secondary personas. From my primary research, I learned that there are 2 major groups of homeless individuals.

A group of homeless people who are just lost due to losing their job or no support.

A group of homeless people just can’t get a job because of their criminal records.

I think defining another secondary persona can provide better visuals in telling a story of their unique needs than the general homeless population.

Next Steps

Two next steps for me and my team are.

Explore more into the design solutions that have been created.

Start creating the minimal viable product (MVP) of our prototype.

Contact Information

For any questions or feedback, feel free to send an email at Hi@christopher.kim