My Village

Encouraging international students to engage with their community

Timeline

3 months
Mar - May 2022

Team

Solo Designer
Advisors

Role

UX/UI Design
Prototyping
User Testing
Overview
The Problem

My Village is a community game that helps people unlock their local community through gamification. By participating in events and collecting coins, users can unlock neighbours in New York, collect rewards, and be a more inclusive part of their community!

My Role
  • Conducting user and contextual research
  • Gamifying ways to interact with local community
  • Designing user flows, wireframes, and HiFi prototyping
  • User testing and iteractions
Solution
1. Personalised Community Activities
Based on the users need of being able to personalise the experience they choose to have in their community, a preference section was designed in the onboarding experience.
2. Join Events using Coins
You start with understanding the impact of community from you locality. The goal here is to connect people with interesting communal activities such as volunteering, walking dogs, and helping a neighbour.
3. Complete Events to Win Coins
The game mechanic is build around gaining good karma points. The more you give your community, the more you can get back in return.
Key Challenges
1. Simplifying the User Interface
In the event discovery section, which was the home page of the design, users preferred seeing icons of events on the map instead of the people hosting the events. The ability to filter events was also desirable.
2. Meeting User's Social Needs
In the events detail page, users were interested in knowing about the attendees instead of the host. Another challenge was to help users remember who they will be meeting. Adding pictures of the people attending helped users remember as people remember faces more quickly than just names.
3. Designing a Forgiving Experience
The events section, which held all the applied events, needed to meet user expectations of interacting with events and organizers, such as messaging them, sharing events, and withdrawing from events.
Key Learnings
1. Gamifying User Engagement
Gamification is a great way to make user experiences fun and engaging. However, there is an art to make them good otherwise they can quickly turn too complicated, confusing, or simply unenjoyable. A great way to introduce them to the experience is by helping users orient themselves in the game's universe through storytelling.
2. Focusing on Micro-Interactions
Through focusing on every single button and icon the user will interact with, I learned about creating sparks of desire for the user. I did this through controlling visual elements such as icons, typography, copy, and more.

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