This series of posts are thoughts and responses to the Designing for Usability course at Parsons School of Design.
Recap on Client brief
Since the start of the project with Stuyvesant Cove Park (SCP), we’ve been having weekly discussions with Candace Thompson, the park manager. A few key points about the current state of affairs:
- SCP is focused on bringing greater awareness to the indigenous plants in the park, which is its distinguishing feature.
- They accomplish this through fostering connections with the plants, through education programs, and encouraging foraging.
- The park is currently undergoing partial closure for redevelopment as part of the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) flood prevention efforts, and foot/bike traffic has been redirected.
The client aims to address the following issues:
- lack of signage directing park goers during its partial closures
- lack of signage to provide information about the indigenous plants
- littering on park grounds, including human and dog waste
- trampling on plants
- graffiti
Update on Research and Interviews
Our team sought to understand the park through site visits, interviews with stakeholders, and attending a community board meeting.
Through the site visits, the client showed the key issues she was talking about during earlier discussions, and introduced key features of the park.
Through the community board meeting, the ESCR signages drafts were shown, and gave us a greater insight into the information that would be conveyed around the park.
We interviewed stakeholders in the park:
- Ceasar, one of the park stewards who knows the park intimately. Ceasar provided information on typical visitors to the park, the extent of the littering problems, and visitor confusion during this closure period.
- Wendy, one of the longest serving volunteers of the park, and also involved in the community around the park. She provided information on the history of the park, types of educational programs, signages in the past, and her observations during the course of volunteering.
Archetypes and Personas
We created archetypes to form an initial understanding of our target audiences, which would be adjusted based on interviews:
We then created an ontology to understand how our target audiences would play a role in our areas of interest:
Then formed behavioral and attitudinal scales based on some key areas. This was shown to the client, who had some issues understanding and following. Changes would be made in the future, but served as a sense-making tool on our end.
Once we had the archetypes, and once the interviews were conduced, we mixed and matched them to form 6 personas.
User Flow
From the personas, we thought about the user flows from their possible use cases.
Key Wireframes
We had several ideation sessions for brainstorming. We considered the budget that Candace proposed, pain points gleaned from interviews, as well as the current infrastructure features of the park.
Reflections
It has been a thoroughly enjoyable process, to hear the views of the people in the park’s orbit, especially the stories and personal connections they have developed with the park. Everyone we interviewed were very much invested in the park, and did not wish to see it in disrepair.
It was difficult to work on a physically located project remotely, and I’m thankful for understanding and accommodating team mates. It has also been a boon that Zoom is so widely accepted, that it was relatively easy to set up interviews. Though I’ve been to the park before briefly, Google Maps Street View was also helpful in refreshing the spatial information in my mind, and serve as a communication tool with my team mates.
