Community Design Project
Identifying community needs and designing a dance booking site
Summary
For this project, I worked in a group of 5 to investigate a community, identify their needs, and design three technological solutions. I connected my group to the local dance community within the Bay Area, reviewed interview/survey questions, sent out surveys to dancers, used thematic analysis to identify pain points within the community, and created lo-fi and hi-fi interactable prototypes. The other members of my team worked on the data analysis and designs for the other 2 prototypes (for a total of 3) and created the interview/survey questions. I specifically worked on a feature to help consolidate information on dance events within a specific area, making it easier for dancers to find and book events from different organizations and studios.
This project was done as the final project in my Introduction to Design Methods class at UC Santa Cruz. We received a perfect score for the project and favorable feedback from our instructor and peers regarding identifying pain points and how our designs tackled these problems.
Problem
Our task was to choose a community to work with, determine their needs, and create three digital solutions/prototypes in an attempt to help meet their needs. As a dancer, I had connections to the local dance community in the Bay Area and in LA, so our group decided to investigate the needs of dancers by sending surveys.
We determined pain points through the qualitative and quantitative data collected and analyzed. Dancers in the greater SF Bay Area and in LA had the following pain points based on the data collected: 1) trouble finding classes, 2) trouble finding other beginner dancers, and 3) struggling with getting dance-related feedback.
Solution
Three distinct prototypes were created to tackle each problem based on the three pain points identified. I worked on the first pain point: dancers had trouble finding classes and dance-related events. I designed a mobile dance event booking website to help users find classes and events in a specific location. The app is also meant to help users book these classes and events in a centralized place for their convenience and help local organizers advertise and get dancers to attend their events.
As a team, we decided to have two surveys, one with open-ended responses and the other with multiple-choice questions and Likert scales. I reviewed the surveys my teammates made to collect qualitative and quantitative data. I then sent the surveys to dancers in the Bay Area after reviewing the surveys and making appropriate changes, such as changing the wording for readability and asking additional questions relevant to dancers. As a dancer myself, I was able to personally reach out to dancers I knew to collect data. I also made posts on my social media with a poster linking to the surveys.
