Building Connection
through a shared sense of space
It all started with one question:
how might we design a way to enhance pedestrian safety in Austin?
It ended with Story Maps, an app that allows users to listen to audio stories about the history of a neighborhood alongside guided walks through the local area, with the goal of strengthening trust and encouraging pedestrian behavior.
Team
Brooke Upchurch
Shonta Bradford
Whitney Arostegui
Timeline
7 weeks research
+
7 weeks
ideation, prototyping, concepting
My Role
UX Research
Concept & Strategy
Visuals & Mockups
User Experience Research
“Hey, what do you think about this intersection?!”
We began this project with a big assumption: that failures in pedestrian safety emerged from individual behaviors on the roads and sidewalks. If 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
From Assumption to “Aha!”
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.
Collective or habitual behaviors superseded the rules of the road.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–of course!–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, and the 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.
Ideation & Prototyping
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 left us with a multitude of ideas around enhancing public space, centralizing local resources in order to decrease the need for driving, and slowing people down on the road. We built lo-fi prototypes of different ideas and tested them with potential users in different neighborhoods of Austin.
Final Design: Story Maps
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 a guided walk through the local area.
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.
Story Maps User Journeys:
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.
Ultimately, Mary and Jo never meet and Jo doesn’t know exactly who Mary is in her neighborhood. But she likes to wave to neighbors who she thinks might be Mary, and has since taken her wife on a Story Maps stroll for date night. Mary smiles whenever she sees someone walking past the local pool wearing headphones, wondering if they’re listening to her story.
And even when Jo is running late on the way to her new job, she drives a bit more slowly down the street, feeling more connection and loyalty to the people that live there.
Main Takeaways:
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.