NÚCLEO

The app that helps you find the perfect neighborhood for you and your plans

Last individual project in Ironhack! In this case we had to look for a problem that affects a niche of the population and try to solve it through a digital solution.

As a good millennial, I am more than familiar with the reality of our generation: it is not unusual for us to leave the land that saw us grow to seek personal or professional growth opportunities in other cities and even countries.

With all this on my mind I decided that my job was to make life easier for those people who were going to a new place to find their new life.

All the work was done between the 5th and 16th of October, in summary 10 days of work.

Tools

1. Empathize & Define the Problem

As we were saying, the research was based on a problem that many of us had had to face when we arrived in a city where we had no acquaintances or relatives to help us, and which would be summarised in the following statement.

When I arrive to a city I don’t know the neighborhoods so it’s hard to know if the flats I like are in the most suitable area for me.

We all had to spend a lot of time researching ourselves on Saint Google, annoying our colleagues or consulting in different spheres to end up realizing that opinions are very subjective and what seems like a panacea for one, is perhaps not for another.

Competitive analysis

Actually in Spain there is no application/web that is dedicated to evaluate the neighbourhoods of the city, so we had to go to the international field to be able to make the analysis correctly, as well as to consult applications that without being exactly the same, they were doing a work related.

User research

To learn first-hand about the problems faced by people who were moving, we conducted 60 surveys and 7 interviews that provided a range of data that made us rethink the direction that the digital solution we were working on first seemed to take.

We were particularly surprised by two facts: first, that more than half of the people surveyed believed that it was important for their neighbourhood to be close to where they lived/worked; second, that what really made them stay in one place was to create their own group of friends.

User Persona

Then we wanted to get to know our user better thanks to the Empathy Map, we created our User Persona Álvaro and developed both the Journey and the Scenario.

2. Organising the information

After several Brainstorming sessions that gathered the information we had obtained, we were quite clear about what we wanted and what we did NOT want for our proposal.

We sorted out all the information using the Affinity map and reflected what our MVP had to have by using the MoSCoW that accompanies these lines.

We conducted a Card Sorting that we tested with several volunteers, applying their feedback until the structure of the site was easily understood. Then, based on the Card Sorting, we made our first Site Map.

The next step was to carry out the User Flow. At this point it became even more evident that the solution needed to go further than just looking for a neighbourhood, otherwise its life cycle would be very short. At that point, two user flows were created, one representing the flow of a user who was accessing for the first time, and the other representing someone who had already indicated his neighbourhood.

3. Shaping the solution

In this case, the solution finally consisted in creating a mobile application that would allow its users to know all the key aspects about the neighbourhoods of the city where they had just arrived. Considering the information obtained in the research and the fact that the app needed to have continuity once the neighbourhood had been chosen, it was decided to develop the initial home page in a different way once the user had already told us where they live.

We started with a low fidelity that was tested on many occasions, just as we did with the mid fidelity.

With all this in mind, we move on to the Moodboard, identity and UI design part of the app. We ended up making the UI Kit, High Fidelity and the Interactions.

4. Núcleo

Prototype

Here you can see the prototype. In the flow you can see how the user initially searches for a specific district, and from there accesses the information of the neighborhood he likes. When he has already decided on the neighbourhood and finally lives there (and tells Núcleo to do so), the “Neighbourhood” screen changes to show him all the information about the place where he is living.

Monetization

The app would have several ways to earn incomes:

1. When the user is looking for a neighbourhood, he or she can see that some houses for rent are advertised, which by clicking on them would direct him or her to pages for buying and renting houses. The application would take a quota according to the visits generated, as well as a percentage if the transaction is carried out.
2. Featured events and shops: Shop owners and event organizers can get a premium account from which they can make their business more visible for a monthly fee.

5. Next steps and Learnings

It is clear that there is a lot to be done, but if I had to decide what the immediate step would be, I would opt for the development of the evaluation of the different items in the neighbourhoods. It would be necessary to create a system which would combine all the information available from public organisations with the ratings made by users, thus creating a realistic ranking of the different neighbourhoods and their characteristics.

Achieved this, we have to work on the events and businesses part, since at the end it is what will make the users not delete our application once they have found the neighborhood they want.

In terms of learning… I am increasingly aware that feedback is essential and in order to reach the final prototype we have to go through a million changes ( which are more than necessary) first. Once again my project needed to show a lot of information on screen to be understood, so I feel very proud of having managed to include everything I wanted in a clean, orderly and above all “light” way.