Safei (Fay) Gu | Design that creates values.

FixiT

|A mobile APP for community communication

OVERVIEW

My Role - Product Manager | UX Researcher | UX Designer | Interaction Designer
Tools - Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, AutoCad, Axure

Design Problem Overview

The residents share little community connection in the neighborhood of Willowtree Apartments on University of Michigan’s North Campus. Meanwhile, the offline house repairing process through leasing office to repairman is quite inefficient. These two facts drove me to design FixiT to improve the sense of community of the residents there through making the house repairing process more efficient, humane, and mutually-beneficial in the neighborhood.

Solution Overview

To realize the two-fold design goal, the most critical feature for this interaction system is to strengthen the communication-based connections among the residents, the leasing office staff, and the mechanics . To enhance such communication-based connections, how people could communicate through Fixit with a group of people under various situations such as SOS/Alerts, Consulting a Neighbor, Initiating/following up with Activities, Reporting Repairing Issues to Leasing Office, is the most important feature for this interaction system. Those four main communication situations turned out to be the four main sections in the main message page of this mobile APP.

Multi-type
Communication

Four intergrated sections to categorize messages into four communication types.
Four navigation buttons at the bottom bar to enable convenient change among message, 3D apartment, contacts, and account control.

Flexible
Widget Board

One powerful and supportive conversation process, which could be embedded with various small widget icons.

Supporting various communication types in one universal chatting interface.

3D
Apartment

Visualize a quick users' guide for new move-ins to get started to check their apartments and to learn how to maintain equipments.
For residents to conveniently record and track the repairing status of their housing equipments.

DESIGN PROCESS

Competitive Analysis

I conducted competitive analysis with three similar platforms: UM Student Life Housing FIX-IT system, Zhidao.baidu.com, Taobao.com.
As I researched these platforms, I compiled a list of problems/bugs, which has worked as a starting point for me to think about how my own design solution can improve those aspects.

10 Interviews & 4 Personas

Based on my 10 interviews with residents in Willowtree Apartments, I developed 4 personas of sample users, and went through their demographic characteristics, daily routines and scenarios to think about their motivations, goals, frustrations, technology and communication preferences of this application. Personas help me think about my solution in the physical context more specifically. I used them to guide my prototypes and to assess my designs.