Building Connection through
Shared Space
Story Maps is a human-centered response to the disconnection and lack of trust that can exist in today’s urbanized cities. Our team designed a service meant to reconnect Austin residents to their local communities and, more importantly, to their neighbors.
Team:
Brooke Upchurch, Shonta Bradford, Whitney Arostegui
My Role:
UX Research: Interviewing users, building organizational systems with data, synthesizing research
Concept & Strategy: Brainstorming sessions with team, market research and analysis around prototypes
Visuals & Mockups: Visual framework representing service (designed using Illustrator), Figma mockups of app design
So it all started with one question:
How might we design a way to enhance pedestrian safety in Austin?
US pedestrian fatality rates are about 10x that of other wealthy western nations.
Here in Austin, the pedestrian fatality rate is 63% higher than the national average.
Our traffic fatality rate is more than 4x that of Seattle.
The Problem
We began this project with a big assumption: that failures in pedestrian safety emerged from individual behaviors on the roads and sidewalks. If only we could pinpoint the behaviors, we could solve for safety.
Research Methodologies:
User intercepts at a high traffic incident intersection in downtown Austin
User interviews with drivers and pedestrians, along with urban safety expert interviews
Card sorting exercises to pinpoint what drives discomfort or feelings of lack of safety
Shadowing pedestrians and drivers to take in their own experiences on the roads
Synthesis:
After reviewing our data, we found a few common themes:
Distrust on the road, between everyone (drivers, pedestrians, cyclists). No one trusted that anyone else would follow the rules, which led to a sense of disconnection and resentment between commuters of all kinds.
An inability for Austinites to overcome the “Texas Car Culture” - fast driving, big roads, inconvenient public transportation options.
“Austin’s just not built for people. The roads here are so wide.”
Collective or habitual behaviors superseded the rules of the road. Different neighborhoods had different habits based on how many pedestrians there were or weren’t.
We realized that pedestrian safety in Austin was inextricably tied to to our physical environments. Individual behavior was a response to urban design more than anything else.
Texan urban infrastructure prioritized
car experiences over pedestrian experiences.
We felt stuck up against the wall of red tape that accompanies changing government policy and decision-making.
Pain point:
Our next step in the process was to build a service based on our research findings. But how could we design a service without fundamentally redesigning our public infrastructure?
Before we could even start the design process, we worked together as a team to build some foundations around our values and how we wanted to work together through the following weeks.
User Research
Defining Our Team Values:
At the onset of our design ideation process, our team collaboratively landed on a few shared values to incorporate into our final design. We wanted:
to build trust and help people feel seen
bring joy to users
design with accessibility in mind for different types of people
to infuse our service with a respect for nature.
Initial Ideation–Market Analysis and Brainstorming:
We began researching preexisting pedestrian-focused solutions and opportunities in the market, including public markets, landscape architecture, and innovative roadside interventions to promote safety (like this Colombian mayor who replaced traffic cops with mime performers).
Our brainstorming sessions were not smooth-sailing. Our first round of ideas were all based on a similar idea – bring local resources to one place in order to decrease the need for driving, thus lowering the number of cars on the road. The feedback we received was that we were trying to do too much–to design for everyone is to design for no one, and we were not going to succeed in getting everyone to stop driving with a single service. We needed to think smaller.
So we regrouped, and started over. Our subsequent brainstorming sessions left us with three very different ideas to explore:
an app to connect residents in the same apartment complex to rideshare, exchange resources, and build social ties.
a historical walking tour service to encourage pedestrian exploration
a landscape service that creates native flower trails along neighborhood sidewalks to build enjoyable walks for pedestrians and offer beautiful scenes to slow down cars
We built lo-fi prototypes of our different ideas and tested them with potential users in different neighborhoods of Austin.
Ideation & Prototyping
As we explored the idea of a historical walking tour, we were inspired by podcasts like This American Life that told human stories. Our prototype evolved over time to Story Maps–which was ultimately the prototype that brought the most joy to our interviewees.
We decided to pursue the prototype that brought the most joy to our interviewees: Story Maps.
Story Maps is an app that allows users to
listen to audio stories about the history of a neighborhood and its inhabitants alongside guided walks.
Inspired by feedback from our user testing sessions, the audio stories are told by the neighbors themselves, in their own voice and their own words – building a deeper connection between residents new and old. This also encourages participation from residents who might not be interested or able to walk around the neighborhood themselves, but have their own story to share with the world.
User Journeys:
We imagined two user personas for this app: Mary and Jo.
Mary has lived in her Austin neighborhood for thirty years. She submits her story to the app about growing up swimming at the local pool, which is where she met her husband and then took her own kids swimming. Story Maps picks up her story, sends an audio team to record it, and publishes it on the app along with a guided walk that starts at the pool and explores the neighboring streets.
Jo just moved into the zip code with her wife and toddler because of an exciting job offer. She discovers Story Maps and decides to go on a walk through her new neighborhood and listen to Mary’s story about the local pool. Some other story options on the app included the history of the corner grocery store and the original planting of the seventy-five year old live oak tree at the nearby park.
App Navigation Mockups:
Conclusion:
Though Mary and Jo never meet in our story, our hope is that their interactions with Story Maps help them both to feel more connected to their community–Mary, by sharing her story with her new neighbors; Jo, by getting to know the history of those who have lived in the area for decades.
Strategic Goals of Story Maps:
increase in number of pedestrians in local pockets
drive higher engagement with community
build trust between neighbors
By achieving these goals, we hope to address some of the underlying reasons for individualistic, unsafe driving decisions that we recognized during our user research.
We believe that nurturing a more connected community can, in turn, foster behaviors that prioritize the collective over the individual.
Final Design: Story Maps
1. Design is not a straight path. Our final product may seem like many steps away from pedestrian safety, but we believe it addresses upstream factors that affect individualistic behaviors.
2. A big part of finding solutions to a problem is defining parameters and constraints. A huge turning point for us was when we realized that our original set of solutions all depended on changing infrastructure policy.
3. Developing healthy team communication habits is hard work and takes time. Being forgiving with each other and with ourselves was instrumental for our team dynamics.