CARTIDO is community crowdmapping made simple.
Create unlimited maps for your friends, community, or private personal use.
I have an intimate understanding of what it means to live on the streets as I experienced homelessness as a teen.
The amount of decision points required to find critical resources such as shelter are staggering in comparison to those who are housing secure.
It takes upwards of 200 - 300x the amount of decision points to find daily critical resources for homeless communities.
This magnitude of decision points overwhelms mental faculties and fosters mental health issues.
CARTIDO started with a simple question:
Can mobile technologies be used to help vulnerable communities lower these decision points?
We needed to find out quickly if it was possible to create a mobile app that could be useful across two demographics.
I knew that both demographics had one common trait. They were using mobile devices to browse multiple websites for resource directories.
I decided our initial use case would be to consolidate all online resources into a single mobile app to bring down the need to browse multiple websites.
In 1 week, I prototyped see|me. An app that functioned as a one-stop directory of resources for homeless communities.
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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I conducted 3 user research sessions across 2 weeks and chose a mix of 60 users across both demographics.100% of participants related three key pieces of information to us:
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A single mobile app directory was helpful. We had created a product that was intuitive to understand and use. However...
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The directories were mostly out-of-date. This does not help homeless communities.
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They wanted an easy way to share street knowledge such as power outlets, safe spaces to rest, etc.
The team tasked me with designing a rapid way for our users to share resource knowledge in real time.
Directories =
Stale Information
Crowdmapping =
Persistent and Shareable
Real-Time Information
We took a risk and launched 2 bold crowdmapping experiments:
Labre was built in 2 weeks. We crawled all the directories and converted known resources to pins on a map. The community could also crowdmap their resource knowledge.
I conducted 4 back-to-back weekly user testing cycles and quickly learned that the crowdmapping mechanic resonated and was easy to learn. However, Labre presented too much noise and information overload.
How could we help users cut through the noise?
zeusjuice exposed users to one single mapped resource, power outlets. We learned there was a deep need for access to power outlets to charge phones. We also began experimenting with GPS functionality to showcase roaming charging stations that we provided.
zeujuice was a huge success with the community. However, users soon began asking for more single focused apps targeting other resources. I was presented with a design conundrum.
How do you start with a multi-resource crowdmapping experience, convert to a single resource experience, then back to a multi-resource experience without introducing significant noise?
The solution was in presenting users with curated, crowdmap collections.
CARTIDO was born: Self curated crowdmap collections of resource maps.
We kept GPS functionality for added travel safety.
With the improved UX flow, CARTIDO was able to provide an experience that matched user aspirations of crowdmapping and unlimited resource map collections.
This solved the noise of crowded maps for our users and high maintenance of multi-single resource apps for us!
From this, we started 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.
A surprise presented itself.
People outside of homeless communities wanted to use CARTIDO to create maps for a wide range of uses: private travel maps, secret hiking trails, hidden vistas, best coffee spots for dates, and more. We had inadvertently created a product that everyone wanted to use!
CARTIDO is an ever evolving product.
It is a celebration of community collaboration & design exploration. It embodies my design ethos of serving communities in a social good capacity and sparking joy through simple and intuitive design.
