In order to make a useful application, as a group, we looked at mapping user pathways which is used to give an indication as to how we expect the participants to use our product. By doing this, it offers opportunities to gather questions as to the interactivity that the application will provide and also how we will deal with and will give us a much better understanding of what we are going to prototype in the weeks to come, and progress on any issues which we may come across. Doing this allows us to visualise the experience through the users eyes, and if we did not do this, we wouldn’t fully understand the best way to go about adressing the users needs.
Below, shows our initial map, displaying how we would expect our application to flow. An example of how this works is “Reporting Issue”, from this area, we can see there are two options, the issue being voted up (meaning this is a more important issue than a less voted issue) or the issue being categorised into its specific area.
One of the points which we talked about was the dilemma of how to get a good user engagement with our product, possibly using some sort of incentive or points scheme to help keep users active and feel rewarded from using the application. Briefly looking into this, we came up with an idea of being able for a user to access how many people they have helped, for example.
In this session we also looked at how we would go forward with prototyping in the following weeks. These are the points we looked at:
How to set up a volunteering group?
How to connect people with the skills/ resources to fix the issue?
Profiles of user (signing up/ update)
Identifying skills or interests.
Identical issues?
Reward systems/ incentives?
Furthermore, one of the problems which we currently face is the indication of the progression of the issue in hand, and who is to deal with that particular issue. At the moment we face a dilemma as to if a problem is too big for locals to fix, and how this can be decided if the council should immediately take this problem on?
Who would be responsible if someone were to try and fix something and made it worse?
How can local groups gather to fix a problem and where?