New In Town: A Newcomer’s Guide to Exploring Their City
Jacqueline Hunter, Wanda Kuang, Evan Huynh, Dylin Stoen
Problem and Solution Overview
As one graduates from college and enters adulthood, one may find that they have to move to a new city for various reasons. Whether it be for a job or the city vibes, moving to a new city can be a daunting task with many obstacles. Some of the major challenges one may face after moving are meeting new people and building relationships and knowing which places they should go to grab a bite and have fun and which ones they should avoid at all costs. We decided to tackle both of these challenges and attempt to find a solution that will help one overcome the two major challenges mentioned prior. We propose a phone application that introduces places and locations that are more hidden and/or popular among the locals to the newcomers. Our application will showcase to our users less traditional and touristy places that one would come across on search engines, such as Google, and provide users with a custom-tailored list of unique places that are personalized to their interests and preferences. Upon arriving at a place recommended by our application, our users will be able to socialize and interact with others that may share similar hobbies and interests. After a few successful usages of our application, our users will be able to make some connections and locate some spots that they enjoyed and will frequent in the future.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
To best tackle this problem, it was in our best interest to collect data from people who recently moved to a new city within the last two years. We first conducted interviews with these participants because we wanted to ask questions that allowed us to explore the vulnerability that some people face when they are challenged socially in this way. These questions revolved around initial experiences in the new city and how they adjusted, as well as the impact on mental health and a sense of belonging. In addition to the interviews, we conducted diary studies where we asked our participants to document their weekend through pictures with captions. This gave us a sense of what life outside of work was like and how our participants combated boredom. The places they would visit would give us valuable information on possible stakeholders that would interact with our design. All participants live in different cities such as Baltimore, Portland, and Washington DC, which provides us with a variety of city cultures and attitudes to study.
Design Research Results and Themes
In our research, we were able to notice some recurring themes that helped us understand the needs that need to be addressed by our design. For example, when selecting a place to go during one’s free time, it can be difficult to find all the desired information about an establishment. Users expressed a desire to have “quick facts” available to provide information such as price range, dress code, and general vibe of the establishment or event. This would better aid planning and reduce social anxiety in those who aren’t familiar with the social norms of a new city or want to plan their weekend in more detail. In addition, full-length reviews are also helpful to our interviewees, but they want them more centralized than an app like Yelp can provide.
Additionally, most participants we spoke to said that it could be difficult venturing out of their neighborhood to find new places. The public transportation systems could be utilized to find direct routes to new places to explore. Additionally, when one finds a new location that is frequented by locals of a similar demographic to themselves, participants felt more at home and were more likely to return to hidden gems in the city.
Overall, a common theme was a strong desire to explore, but a lack of inspiration for where to go or who to go with. When there is some amount of success at finding a favorite local spot, participants feel more confident in their surroundings and have better luck making connections or friendships. However, this takes significant time, from weeks to years, to find their perfect niche in the city and its unique culture.
Proposed Design: Phone Application
One of the patterns we noticed in the interviews we conducted is that people generally wanted to try new places but they never seem to actually enact those plans. It was until we conducted the diary studies which revealed a pattern in the places people went too essentially going to the same places every night out. This gives us the idea that people tend to allocate very little time in planning if they couldn’t think of somewhere to go on the spot and would fall back to going to a place they were familiar with. We also noticed from the diary studies that once people arrived at a place they would, rather than go to one place then head home, go to several different places in one night. Therefore, our design needed to be both quick at recommending places and mobile for when they want to go to another place while they are still out which led us to our design of a phone application. This achieves the flexibility, accessibility, and mobility we need in order to provide users with a helpful application that recommends places to go, quick and wherever they are at with no additional gadgets they have to carry around.
Figure 1: Storyboard of a user struggling to find where to go out in their city until they resort to using our application for the solution.
Here, our phone application is accomplishing the goals we set by delivering the user a quick and easy recommendation as opposed to what people normally do, which is to go on google and search for places to go taking up tons of time, and given the data from our research, is time they are not willing to lose. Instead of relying on a service that isn’t built to know about the smaller areas in each person’s city, normally recommending the usual 10 spots they already know about, our application will be built for the purpose of recommending those hidden spots and doing so without losing the time people spend searching on Google. The application also gives us flexibility by opening us up to further personalize the experience for the user. We can do this by implementing built-in questions we ask users right after making an account, which would later be used to recommend places that better suit their interests. In the diagram, the service is not just recommending a local bar only because it’s a hidden gem but rather the user input this ahead of time, when making the account, that they liked to go to bars. Narrowing the focus in this way eliminates the need to not only think about where to go but also what to do which are two things we found people struggled with when going out to places. The user in the diagram didn’t even know what to do at the time, but the application kept track of what they preferred and liked and thus recommended the great idea to go to a local bar in their area.
In addition to solving where to go and what to do, our application can also be extended to include who to go with, which is another problem we noticed in the interviews. The phone, in its ability to be ‘online’ everywhere a person goes, allows us the opportunity to store endless amounts of data in the servers to better personalize our recommendations to the users. One of these pieces of data can be how the user enjoyed that night out. Combining this with their interests we can develop an even smarter algorithm that recommends places based on what kind of personality is expected at each location. The diagram shows a situation we found a lot of the people we interviewed had a problem with. This problem occurred when they just moved to a new city and now they have to find friends which were difficult given the new and unfamiliar environment. The person in the diagram got recommended a local bar because, in addition to their preference is going out to bars, our application also noticed they liked to play pool and so it combined these two preferences along with feedback from other users, who recommended that specific bar for pool players.
