Creating an app that helps solve an unseen issue of Young Adult Homelessness
The core of the project was to solve a government problem. In this case, a small group of 3 looked at homelessness. Open arms look at and try to solve the problem of Teen and young adult homelessness. The service is to help youths find protected homes that they can stay in for a few days so that teens and young adults can help get back on their feet or find safe shelter for the night. This helps adolescents focus on getting back on their feet and not worrying about where they will stay.
Open Arms is a service provided to show solutions to young adults and teens seeking support or short-term stays so they can have safety and shelter while they are or before becoming homeless.
Understand the struggles the young onset homelessness causes
Creating an app and service were people can sign up to help or to take in young adults experiencing homelessness
To help thousands of young adults get back on their feet when getting kicked out or while they are homeless
The research was pretty straightforward. Find out how the app can help, find a way to present the app, and find out how people and teenagers can use the app. With these in mind, we needed to do some background research to find out how many people are afflicted by homelessness. Then findings what colors helped people to set their minds at ease. And finally how to set up the app so that it was universal and easy to use for people wanting support and people needing a place to stay.
To empathize with the scenario the team did research on Teenage homelessness. To figure out how they lived and to better understand what they go through on a daily. With teen homelessness, they are typically couching surfing from home to home giving goods, or staying with friends for this. The goods are a nicer way of what they actually did, so this led to creating an app to help create a safer environment for people to stay in.
We went through and interviewed people from ages 14 to 26 to get an idea and see how they went through hard times in their youth. We had to do preliminary research on the interviewees to see if they had homeless issues. In our qualitative research of 18 participants, we found that most of them were dependent on a guardian or parent.
In this we found a mixed amount of participants that had either a disruptive house hold or experienced a brief amount of "homelessness". Their "homelessness" wasn't true homelessness they did bounce from couch to couch while moving apartments or finding a place to stay while they got on their feet. This data helped the team better empathize with knowing how people would live or how they found ways to stay off the street.
In the case of disruptive house holds it would be either too noisy with other siblings or parents making a lot of noise. These disruptive house holds let to less concentration on school working or relaxing when they would get home.
The research was prevalent on understanding what peoples needs and key features would be from the app.
Through the user interviews we developed a user journey that encapsulated the process of which the user would use the app. This also allowed us to make a more in-depth site map
Through the user interviews we developed a user journey that encapsulated the process of which the user would use the app. This also allowed us to make a more in-depth site map
Wireframes were sketched and used to test participants on how well the functions and features would be used.
Through TryMyUI we found that most participants were able to complete the task at 100% on the web page. Although, users using tablet or mobile found struggles with the app or with the aspect of TryMyUI. Participants had an overlay completion rate of 77% and an increased time of 182.6 seconds to complete the base run of the app. To fix these problems we addressed a more guided approach to the app to ease the flow. We need to make buttons more visible and more universal so that the wide-ranging audience could know what icons they are looking for and at. Each participant used the app and gave feedback on what they would want or how it worked with them. March 15th -17th all participants completed the test.
UI kit before making the app to make sure the team had cohesion on development. We found the UI kit allowed us to tweak and make the app faster without having to ask each other about fonts or button sizes.
In this research phase, we looked for participants' overall satisfaction with the app, and if anything was overlooked in our initial testing. We had to adjust some of the color palette as before it was too bright for users to see. We then settled on a darker shade of green to give it a more hopeful and energetic feel. People were also having trouble viewing the map, we darkened the roads and made the map clearer to the users. We also made the resource page more simple so that users would want to engage and help with this issue.
