VISION
The genesis of CARTIDO started with a simple vision...Help street communities find needed resources rapidly through mobile technologies.
PROBLEM
I personally experienced homelessness as a teen and I have an intimate understanding of what it means to live on the streets.
The decision points around finding resources is exponential compared to those who are housing secure. The act of finding something like power outlets can require upwards of 10 decision points. When you add the need for food, bathrooms, showers, shelter, legal aid, education, employment assistance, etc those decision points can be on an order of magnitude of 200 - 300x.
This magnitude of decision points can overwhelm daily mental faculties and foster mental health issues due to ongoing feelings of despair and despondency. This makes solving homelessness ever difficult.
USER PERSONAS
Adults between the ages of 18 - 45 living on the streets who are familiar with newer mobile technologies.
Older adults ages 45+ living on the streets who may be having a harder time adopting newer technologies.
We needed to find out quickly if it was possible to create a mobile app that could be useful across these two demographics and any potential high friction points.
USE CASE THEORY
We knew that both demographics had one common trait. They were often going to different web sites to find out about resources. We decided to start simple and consolidate the fractured landscape of online resources into one mobile app. This was our initial use case.
In 1 week, we prototyped an initial product called see|me as a mobile app directory of resources for the housing insecure and street communities.
USER JOURNEY
More user research was needed before we could understand the potential user journey of our product. However, we established a baseline user journey to test through our initial MVP wireframes.
User selects resource category
User views selected list ordered nearest to user's location
User views selected single resource view
INITIAL MVP WIREFRAMES
App Launch
User selects resource category
User views selected list ordered nearest to user's location
User views selected single resource view
Simple, consolidated experience
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USER RESEARCH
We conducted 3 user research sessions over the course of 2 weeks with a total mix of 50-60 people across both demographics. In each session, 100% of participants related three key pieces of information to us in regards to user experience:
1 - Consolidating online directories into a single mobile app was greatly helpful. We had created a product that was intuitive to understand and use. However...
2 - Resource directories for street communities are not maintained well by their respective organizations and information becomes stale quickly. This does not truly help the communities we were assisting.
3 - Our users wanted an easy way to share resource knowledge they were carrying in their heads such as power outlets, safe spaces to rest, and more. They wanted to share street knowledge.
I was tasked with designing a rapid way for them to share resource knowledge in real time. We launched a bold experiment in crowdmapping.
Directories = Information Death
Crowdmapping = Persistent and Shareable Real-Time Information
THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR
From our learnings, I designed 2 high fidelity crowdmapping experiments, Labre and zeusjuice.
Labre was built in 2 weeks. It took the resources listed in static directories and converted them to pins on a global map that users could crowd map and add additional resources.
Through a tight weekly user research cycle over one month, we quickly learned that the crowdmap concept was a good start. However, Labre presented information overload as everything was shown on one global map.
zeusjuice took the initial experiment with Labre and converted it into a single use experience. Users were exposed to one single resource (power outlets) on a global map. We chose power outlets due to the high demand street communities have for charging their mobile devices.
We also began experimenting with GPS functionality. With zeusjuice, users could track our team when we offered mobile power charging services.
zeujuice was a huge success with the community. However, users soon began asking for more single focused apps targeting other resources.
We were presented with a deep conundrum. Crowdmapping was the way to go. Yet, a global map of all resources created information overload. Single use crowdmapping apps were more information focused, but the maintenance costs for multiple apps was too high.
I was tasked by the team to design a singular solution, so I got to head scratching and discovered...
INITIAL CROWDMAPPING SLC WIREFRAMES
With the improved use case and UX flow, CARTIDO is able to provide an experience that matches user aspirations of crowdmapping and collecting unlimited, focused maps.
This solved the noise of a global map and high maintenance of multiple single use apps!
A RADICALLY DIFFERENT USER EXPERIENCE
I folded all of the previous concepts in see|me, Labre, and zeusjuice into one seamless experience:
Self curated collections of travel/resource maps crowdmapped by community members. We kept GPS functionality for added travel safety. We call it CARTIDO.
We set out with the mission to create a social good technology that could help street communities. Along the way, we discovered those outside of street communities began asking if they could use CARTIDO.
People wanted to create maps for a wide range of uses: curated travel maps, secret hiking trails, hidden vistas, best coffee spots for dates, the possibilities are unlimited. We had inadvertently created a product that everyone wanted to use!
BONUS DISCOVERY!
From this, we have begun designing and developing our proprietary Nested Mapspace Engine.
The Nested Mapspace Engine is based on the concept of hyper curated maps within maps or as we have termed "nested" maps.
IN DEVELOPMENT
PRODUCT PRIDE
CARTIDO is an ever evolving product based on continuous user research and feedback cycles.
It is a celebration of exploration & community collaboration, and a product that I am deeply proud of designing. It embodies my design ethos of serving humanity and sparking joy. Unleash the explorer in you!
