Locally
Adobe Jam Challenge
🏆 Awarded Honorable Mention
Locally is an Andriod 'Lite-based' app that enables users to discover local small businesses, services, and freelancers around them while minimizing bandwidth utilization.
🕚 Timeline
July 15 - July 2021
👥 Team
Rachael Legge & Eduardo Paz
✨ Role
UX & UI Designer
Challenge 🎯
Design an accessible third-party app for Android mobile devices that highlight users' favorite local and undiscovered small businesses.
Insight 🤔
Big businesses have unlimited marketing resources, where small businesses and freelancers have to keep hustling to continue revenue flow.
Solution ✨
Locally combines social media and location-based services to introduce users to local businesses / services curated specifically for them. The app enables the user to discover new merchants and services around them while minimizing bandwidth utilization.
How might we design a solution to empower the community to highlight small businesses and/or creators through a platform of discovery?
Design Considerations
Timeline
Secondary Research
We conducted secondary research to get a better understanding of how to design an app that performs well with low bandwidth. The UX Planet website provided us with seven key practices to take into consideration while designing for poor connectivity.
Key Takeaways
1.
Users value the customer service & community that is associated with small businesses.
2.
Users find local small businesses more expensive than larger chain companies.
3.
Users would prefer to prioritize image & text-based data on mobile apps when experiencing low bandwidth.
User Survey
Insights
Prioritized Logical Hierarchy
Rich high resolution images are data-consuming. We wanted to prioritize images and compress high resolution pictures.
Design a ‘Lite’ app
Facebook & Twitter have a Lite version of their apps that are minimalistic & low on graphics, providing the bare essential content. We decided to research companies that design ‘Lite’ based apps.
Design A ‘Text Only’ Version
‘Text only’ versions of apps can be used in times of poor connectivity. We decided to make a ‘Text only’ feature to allow users to still access the data / information in the app.
More than half of users would prioritize images when experiencing low bandwidth. A large number of users wanted to preserve text data.
Competitive Analysis
UI Style Guide
Brainstorming Ideas
After conducting our user surveys we brainstormed our ideas. We used the design considerations from the brief as categories to arrange our insights. This helped us understand the key features that we wanted to include in our final design.
Userflow
The main navigation pages have a text-only toggle switch to make the application consume the least amount of bandwidth possible yet still enable the user to discover local businesses.
Supports Local Businesses
Locally supports small businesses by highlighting and sharing the stories of local businesses / freelancers to users. The app enables users to discover new merchants & services around them while minimizing bandwidth utilization.
Final Prototype
Lite Mode
The main navigation pages have a text-only toggle switch to make the application consume the least amount of bandwidth possible yet still enable the user to discover local businesses.
Dropdown feature
On business and freelancers pages there are drop-down features that allow the users to easily scan and select the information they need to access while preserving data
Community
Locally allows users to connect with friends to share local spots that they have visited and liked. The app enables users to join and invite friends to events hosted by local businesses.
Reflections
“Local owned businesses have a homey / welcoming down to earth feel. Most big chains feel generic and cold”
“Local & small are usually much more expensive in comparison to larger chain stores. For certain unique items, I shop small, but most of the items I buy are from bigger companies”
“I like to support small businesses because it makes me feel more connected to the community”
Typography
Color Palette
Iconography
Accessing in low-bandwidth conditions for those without high-speed internet.
Adding meaning to personalize functions and allow for emotion.
Promoting others through personal connections and touch points.
Before this project, I never really dabbled with Adobe XD or designed for an Android mobile device. This project enabled me to add new software, and user interface to my skill set. The one-week timeline drove me to adapt my design thinking and research strategies to ensure that I was able to deliver a valid product that met the design criteria from the brief.
Although this project was had a short turnaround, in future projects I’d like to make more time for user-testing. I am thankful to have had such an amazing teammate like, Eduardo, that brought an incredible skillset to this project and made the project fun.