Street Nature Score

Process

During the first four months I carried out a market research within a team of four person: Joyce Toh, George Moore and Philip Brown. First, we carried out together more than 20 interviews with both potential users (home seekers) and potential customers (realtors). Thanks to these we unveiled four main user/customer's needs:

- information and meaning about the computed score

- more immersive user interface in addition to a simple 2D map

- emphasise of property valuation

- recommendation and advice to take advantage and enjoy of urban nature

Street Nature Score is a website that calculates the amount of nature at a specific location in the United States resulting in a scorecard associated to this address. The goal of this project is to find a market for this concept, design a software that will suit users and elaborate a business plan. While a few markets can be considered, we decided to focus on the real-estate market.

Concept

Where: University of California, Berkeley

Skills: Design Thinking, Wireframing, UX/UI

When: September 2016 - May 2017

What: Conducting customer research, ideation, prototyping to build the Street Nature Score website.

Screenshot of the current beta-website of Street Nature Score

Then we generated 80 concepts during an ideation phase using brain writing. We linked and ranked each of these concepts to the user needs. By doing that we created a weighted matrix that ranked our concepts accordingly. We processed with two main steps:

We have chosen 4 user needs and decided to define them broadly. Then we chose our rating scale: 1 to 5. “1” means “does not meet this user need” and “5” means “does fully meet this user need”. We then sum the 4 ratings (each rating corresponding to one user need) to obtain a total score for one given concept.

Finally we have pondered each user need, attributing them a percentage considering their importance. Thus, for instance, we attributed 30% to “property value” and 20% to “Recommendations” because the need for property valuation is more imported than the need for recommendations for the user. Then we multiply each ratings by the corresponding percentage and we obtain a new total score for each concept.

For the prototyping phase, we selected 4 concepts (in the top 20 concepts) that seemed the most realisable from a technical point a view:

- gives the possibility to the user to personalise his score considering different filters (trees, water creeks etc.)

- gives advice on activities close to nature the user can do alone or with friends (pic-nic in a park, jogging etc.)

- informs the user on what project development local authorities are carrying at the moment

- provides a link to social media

Each of us came up with a low fidelity prototype of the Street Nature Score website using Balsamiq or PowerPoint. We carried out user testing to gather feedback on our wireframes and refine them.

Finally we worked collectively to deliver a high fidelity prototype. It was focused on the concepts we selected and took into account the insights we collected during the user testing phase.

Interviews demographics

User needs and associated quotes

Illustration of the ranking concept

Low fidelity wireframe

High fidelity wireframe

In order to illustrate the use case of Street Nature Score we made a pitch video. It stages a realtor explaining how Street Nature Score enabled one of his customer to move to a better place. The video also includes a description of of the final high-fidelity wireframes.

Pierre Fredenucci