Storyville

Objective
Design and prototype an iPhone application for recent retirees to aid them in building their local community

My contributions
Ideation
Feature selection
Persona design
Scenario design
Wireframing
Prototyping

Storyville is a mobile application that helps retirees create and explore grassroots tours of their local neighborhoods. They can incorporate their own stories about places in their community, and contribute to a collective voice about our towns that treasures their experience and diversity. The application has two modes – one for tour-making and one for tour-taking – along with collaborative features such as adding to a tour, submitting feedback and recommendations, and sharing tours. The goals of Storyville are accessibility, ease of use, enriching local history, and positive social contribution for retirees.

The application is the result of an iterative, user-centered design process. Our first step was to identify a target user group, then to perform research on the goals, interests, and behaviors of that group. Based on that research, we scrapped our initial app idea (a service similar to Yelp that targeted an older user base) and went back to the drawing board. The resulting idea is much stronger than our first one, more unique and better focused on our target users. We further refined the app functionality in a subsequent round of peer critiques.

Further details and live demo available at the product website.

Process