PROCESS

DOMAIN & SCOPE

We started ideating with the goal of assisting youths with free resources where they can grow emotionally or educationally. Currently, there are no apps that offer resources exclusive to the the LGBTQA+ community. We wanted to cater specifically to youths who identify as LGBTQA+ and help them seek refuge in their times of need.

RESEARCH & IDEATION

Our biggest inspiration was AIRBNB, but we also drew patterns from Tindr and Google. After refining our scope, we realized that we needed to cater to a specific group of youths. All of us on the team have had different experiences with LGBTA+ family members and friends, so the idea to cater specifically to them meant alot to us as a team.

We feel that our personal connection to this domain has really shown in our application. It really shows through on how we approached our research. All of our research was approached with carefulness. Privacy and anonymity were important to us as a group, so when we conducted our interviews and meetups, we made sure to ensure that.

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SCENARIO


Gregory Santiago is an 18 year old high school student. He is graduating this year and has decided start a horomonal transition from biological male to female before star ting university. Gregory isn’t entirely comfortable with his transition just yet, and only few people know that he has begun horomones. Among these few people, Gregory has told his parents and a few close friends.

Gregory’s aunt is coming into town two weeks from now and they have never been able to get along in the past. He does not want to associate with her during her stay, so his parents are okay with him leaving for a few days before she leaves. However, that choice is up to him.

Here, we created a map showing Greg’s process through the app, highlighting his possible experience, actions, and thoughts, as well as how he would achieve his goals.

Solutions


To address this problem of enhancing safety and security for the users we came up with the following solutions:

01. External screening - In order to ensure the user is as safe as possible, apart from a review system, we also decided to partner with local youth clinics for the screening of the host.

02. Hostel route- This route uses a digital check in and confirmation for users who are uncomfortable staying with someone unfamiliar.

03. Chat system - The address of the host isn’t revealed until they confirmed the stay request.

04. Facebook link - In order to identify the user as a real person, we decided our app would link anonymously to the user’s Facebook account, further ensuring the safety of the host

STYLE


Because of the urgent nature of the user’s situations, we decided to design primarily for ios, and designed for a flat, clean interface. We chose muted colours that look soothing, while conveying the “lighthouse” theme of our app. We also made sure that the language throughout our application is conversational and calming for anxious youths in any situations.

WIREFRAMES


Our design process started with creating grey box wireframes to get an idea of the flow of our app, as well as the placement of our content an menus. We refined these wireframes over the course of 2 weeks to achieve high fidelity mockups that we showed our users for our user testing.

USER TESTING + REFINEMENTS


We selected our users from a pool of youths and youths who identify as LGBTQA+. What we didn't realize as adult designers was that youths would have a different idea of what would be clear visual hierarchy. Here are some of the main concerns our users had and how we found solutions to them.

TEAM | CHUA, JOHANNA | FU, ANDREA | JIANG, WILLIAM | LIMIAC, JOHN | TARRAYO, ALEXA |