This project helps you grow social capital, strengthen community, and expand your network through local events, learning, and connections.

Role &
Timeline

Individual Work, Research & Design
Duration: 3 month
Design Field： UX Design, User Research

Secondary Research

I researched how AI shapes our content exposure on social media to understand media platforms' impact.

Our Post
Covid Life

What will life look like post-pandemic? Masks, testing, and home offices may stay as people adapt to new norms.

What else?

Remote work surged during the pandemic for safety and is now 4-5 times more common, enabled by video calls and networks (McKinsey).

Where do they go?

Many left big cities for suburbs during COVID, driven by safety, appeal, and high costs, with address changes up 27%.

What else?

Remote work surged during the pandemic for safety and is now 4-5 times more common, enabled by video calls and networks (McKinsey).

Our Post
Covid Life

What will life look like post-pandemic? Masks, testing, and home offices may stay as people adapt to new norms.

Where do they go?

Many left big cities for suburbs during COVID, driven by safety, appeal, and high costs, with address changes up 27%.

Our Post
Covid Life

What will life look like post-pandemic? Masks, testing, and home offices may stay as people adapt to new norms.

What else?

Remote work surged during the pandemic for safety and is now 4-5 times more common, enabled by video calls and networks (McKinsey).

Where do they go?

Many left big cities for suburbs during COVID, driven by safety, appeal, and high costs, with address changes up 27%.

We return to our homes, spending more time in our local communities.

Interview

01 Definition

The residents presents to have two defination for community. They define community as a place where people live together and as a group of people with the common interest that provides support to each other.
“Neighborhood, neighbors, family, kids.”
“People with common backgrounds or interests.”

02 Our needs

We are aware that community provides us essential information and resources we need that lead us to opportunities. People in the community depend on each other to exchange values and resources.
“Community brings me all kinds of support, resources and opportunities. We exchange values and we need each other.”

03 Our hopes

80% of participants report they wish their communities could be more diverse, with more different people and opinions that could essentially expand their networks.
“I hope my community could be more diverse, bring different people, opinions, and platform for access to different networks.”

04 Our concerns

One participants report that the some online community, especially on social media,  might cause appearance anxiety or other emotional distress.
“Seeing other’ idealized life/body shape on social media makes me feel anxious about my own body.”

05 Our thoughts

100% of the participants report they are willing to devote their time to their community. All the participants report they have contributed to their community and believe there are more things they could do.
“I’m definitely willing to. I’m willing to offer my knowledge and experience for people need it.”

06 Our activities

60% of participants report that the activities they enjoy the most are things that cost their mental effort (ie. competitive video games, piano, lego).
“I like the competitive nature of video games. Even though it requires a lot of focus, the feeling of winning brings me a sense of achievement.”

Interview insights

Empowerment

We aim to build a diverse, supportive community where members can expand networks, access resources, and gain the support they need by investing their time effectively.

2

Initiative

Members have clear goals and a willingness to contribute but lack the platform and incentives to get started.

3

Support

Online communities can cause distress, prompting a desire for more care, support, and emotional connection.

4

Flow

Leisure activities may require mental effort, yet participants enjoy the process or outcome, often reaching a flow state.

Social Capital

With these findings in mind, I conducted Literature reviews to get a deeper understanding of the concept of community from SOCIAL CAPITAL IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT report. And I found:

       “Community needs the key ingredient -- Social Capital, includes bonding, bridging and linking networks that provides us access to resources and new opportunities to achieve our goals. ”

Bonding Networks
Bonding Networks
Bonding Networks

Why is Social Capital so important to us?

It allows people to work together and to access benefits from social relationships. More importantly, our Community depends on its social capital and social capital shapes the community at the meantime.

How to develop your social capital?

How can we use our time to develop and enjoy the benefits of the social capital we have?

01

“On Average, people have 5 hours of free time each day. Turns out doing nothing and watching TV is NOT that enjoyable after all!”

02

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed “Flow State”, a mental state that increase happiness and creativity.
How to reach flow state
  • Fully immersed in what you are doing
  • Accomplish something difficult and worthwhile
  • Skills are utilized
  • Engagement and concentration
Flow state leaves you
  • motivated and fulfilled
  • increased creativity and happiness
  • Sense of “total control”
  • improve your social status

How might we help community members to use their leisure time to effectively develop their social capital, thus bringing them expanded resources and potentially leaving them in the flow state?

Ideation process

To explore design opportunities based on insights and HMW statement, I conducted a crazy 8 brainstorming process. The below 4 design oppotunities focus on utilizing and connecting social capital in the community and creating an emotional supportive online community.

Design goals

An online community platform that focuses on utilizing the local social capital to help its residents to expand their networks.
An online community platform encourages its members to efficiently exchange and utilize their resources in their leisure time to bring them a sense of fulfillment potentially.
An online community platform that connect people with similar traits and inspire them to provide emotional support to each other.

Wireframes

With the design goals in mind, I designed the following wireframes, including log in page, landing page, description page, posting page, following page and profile page.

Testing

Navigation
One users report he wants to edit his tags in order to find more events, but doesn’t know where to find it.
Readability
User thinks the most of text are too small to read on the description page.
Map view
50% of users think map view limits the amount of posts they scroll through, they wish to have list view as well.
Insufficient Message
User reports he wishes to edit the event he posts and view event he participated.
Clickability
30% of users report that clickable elements are hard to identify.
Design Consistency
Some users report inconsist experience -- icons, shapes, buttons.

Onboarding

Start exploring and growing your social capital by selecting tags and locations.

Joining an event

View events near your location by map view or list view, and sign up with one click.

Creating
and event

Create an event by setting a time and category. Choice to collaborate with other people! Edit and view joined members after posting.

Expanding your social capital

Explore and follow people with same tags and interests with you. Keep up with their posts and events!

Strengthen your connection

Build a deeper connection with group chats and private messages. Let’s make friends!

Thank you for viewing!

haileyfu777@gmail.com