Understanding how your app is used
It is crucial for any town or city to have a central information hub that is easily used and accessed by both its residents and visitors. For most places, their website serves this role. That being said, most municipal websites are clunky and unorganized due to poor structure and design choices.
After reviewing Newtown, CT’s website, I took it upon myself to redesign the site in a way that puts the user first. This process began by reorganizing the site’s architecture to make it more effective and user-friendly for both residents and visitors. Additionally, I determined that it would be best to create an accompanying smartphone app to serve a similar purpose for on-demand information.
After creating the information architecture for this new app, the next important step is to consider how the user will interact with it. What are the user’s goals? What is currently getting in their way? How will they get from point A to point B?
By creating what are called user flowcharts, we can determine the journey that users will go on when navigating your app. These are useful for getting to know and understand your user on a deeper level.
To start, I determined the different audiences for the app. Newtown’s companion app will focus on on two primary audiences and one secondary.
The first primary audience is residents of the town. These are people who live in the town who know many things aout the time, but need to access certain things such as parks & recreation information or an events calendar. They know what they are looking for when they go to the app and need to be able to access it quickly and with ease.
The second primary audience is visitors to the town. These are people who do now know anything about the town and are looking for information about the town and things to do in it. This audience will prioritize exploration within the app, so showing a variety of things to do with proper information is a must.
The lone secondary audience for this app is prospective visitors to the town. These are people who don’t know much about Newtown, but are planning/thinking about coming to or moving to Newtown. Having a variety of information to learn from as well as links to the website when needed for more in depth information will create a great experience for these users.
Below are three user personas which represent each of these audiences.
Now that we know our audiences, it’s to create their stories. Making narratives in the form of user stories and user scenarios will allow us to get a better understanding of why the users will interact with the app. From there we can create our flows.
I won’t go over all of the stories, scenarios, and flows here. However, they are all detailed in the document below, which I encourage you to take a look at.
Hi! My name is Peyton McKenzie.
I am a professional graphic designer, photographer and content creator.
I encourage you to explore my portfolio to get a better idea of the work I create. If you are interested in working with me or have inquiries of any kind, don’t hesitate to reach out over email.
