Our attention gets pulled in more directions now than ever. The idea behind Common Ground started as a way to help people spend more quality time with their families. At its core, Common Ground is a service dedicated to helping families explore new interests and find exciting new things to do together.

This particular solution started as a challenge to design for social good. From research to the second round of prototyping and presentation, the project commenced on June 7th, and culminated on July 2, 2021.

Persona

Preliminary User Research looked at how the typical family makes time for family activities, what they typically end up doing, and how they decide what to do.

A clear divide emerged between families that do family night at least once per week, and those families that really struggle to have a regular time for each other. Typically, these families have both working parents, usually in a metropolitan area, and have 1 to 3 children under 18 years of age.

While considering insights gained from interviewing the target demographic, as well as from auditing both direct and indirect competition, I started to reconsider the typical process a family goes through when planning family experiences and spending quality time with each other. The storyboards below depict both the general and specific views of the ideal solution.

I brainstormed on different ways the process could be made to feel as convenient as possible, while also allowing users to explore a variety of interests.

Storyboards

The intention of the design is to make the app feel like a friendly, stress-free place. The Common Ground app, is built on a mix of a matrix and database structure.  Testing a low fidelity prototype helped me refine the basic layouts. Above you can see the wireframes that would soon become the prototype.

A group of 10 test users participated in an early usability study. Participants tested out the early design as they searched, explored, and registered for experiences. Participants were also prompted to save an experience for later, find and read an article, and play around with account settings. Following the prompts, a survey asked a series of both quantitative and qualitative follow-up questions to determine how participants thought and felt about their user experience.

Themes & Insights

The site’s matrix structure resulted in test users taking many different courses to complete the task flow. However, several key behavioral trends still emerged from the study. Most test users expressed that they wanted an easier way of telling how much time and effort each family experience would take to prepare for and do. This above all else, they overwhelmingly said, would help them decide which activity to pick.

Through careful analysis and synthesis of trends in the data, several key insights emerged. Most notably, the process of judging the cost of time & effort (and even the anticipation of having to judge) demotivates users more than any other part of the task flow. Some test users also dropped off and made errors due to redundant pages and a lack of clear indicators of what to do or where to go next. Should this project continue, future usability studies should focus on how we can make the time & effort scale more relatable and intuitive for users.

Using a combination of Adobe programs (XD, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro), I produced the video below, which briefly demonstrates the Common Ground prototype. Check it out below!