Community Design Project

UX Researcher and Designer

November - December 2023

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, 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, 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 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.

Skills: writing, research, data analysis, design

Software: Google Forms, Excel/Google Sheets, Miro, Figma

Identifying the Problem

Our task was to choose a community to work with, determine their needs, and create 3 digital solutions/prototypes to help meet their needs. As a dancer, I had connections to the local dance community in the Bay Area and 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 LA had the following pain points based on the data collected: trouble finding classes, finding other beginner dancers, and struggling with getting dance-related feedback.

Research Methods

I reviewed the surveys my teammates made with written responses and Likert scales 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 reach out to dancers I knew to collect data personally. I also made posts on my social media with a poster linking to the surveys. After collecting data over several days, I took the data from the Google Surveys sent out to participants and organized them on a spreadsheet based on how relevant the questions were in relation to each other. I then took a portion of the responses onto a Miro board to organize the responses to each question. I used thematic analysis to find commonalities between responses to the question, “In what ways has being a part of dance contributed to your personal growth, whether in terms of skills, confidence, or other aspects of your life?” I split the more extended responses into multiple ones if they had talked about different topics and found that six themes emerged from the responses.