Coordinated

Inspiration

Coordinated is inspired by the work of cartographer/artist Denis Wood and an interest in mixing art and design with data visualization. Wood's work in mapping Boyland Heights, North Carolina was able to reveal the hidden socioeconomic and racist divides within a community with maps of fences, jack-o-lanterns, and more. With Coordinated, we'd like to extend mapping to the community, and allow the data to take us in any direction. Who knows? Maybe our users could find something surprising.

What it does

Creative collaborative social media app that encourages people in a community to map everything around them- this can be anything!. Users create threads that allow others to contribute to their maps by dropping relevant pins. Over time, a catalogue of trends and changes are visible. Users become trendsetters by utilizing their surroundings to spot the things that are important to them. Contributions to maps allow them to get more visibility and thus more data. Overall, our app encourages exploration and observation.

How we built it

When building Coordinated, our process was to conduct interviews based on social media, experiences, and habits to see what people enjoyed and did not enjoy about their media use. Taking what we learned, we implemented features such as a tagging and comment system to introduce new niches. At the same time, we added restraints such as anonymity and queueing to protect privacy and reduce hierarchy. From there, we worked on establishing user personas and journeys to mimic how a potential user might use Coordinated. Turns out, for a lot of reasons. We made Coordinated to be quite open in possibilities, meaning that each user experience would be different based off of their locations and interests

Challenges we ran into

• It was challenging at first to figure out how to consolidate all the information and features in a clear and concise way, especially since we were focusing our app around user data.
• There was a bit of miscommunication, and thus we ran into challenges of overlaps in the work that was completed and needed to be done.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Created a data-driven app that is new and fun!
• We're proud of where our research took us and the efforts we made to create specific user personas and journeys for different populations. The preparation before the final prototype allowed us to make changes to the system that would have been more difficult if the components were already built.

What we learned

We learned that it's important to communicate early on what we expect the final product and system will be before we delegate tasks. Though we figured out early on some of the issues that could arise in our system, we were able to fix and change them through iterating our flows, frames, and eventually final prototype

What's next for Coordinated

Coordinated will grow with its userbase and the more actively people participate in adding coordinates. In the future, we'll be able to compare data trends over time and link threads that seemed like they had nothing to do with each other.

View our presentation deck and our clickable prototype!

Built With

• adobe-after-effects
• adobe-xd
• figma