PeopleSourced Policy

A nonprofit aiming to increase community engagement in the political process

The Challenge

Assess the viability of an app that educates people about city budget planning in a game format by evaluating the usability of an existing app, identifying areas of improvement, and proposing recommendations of potential improvements.

The Process

Heuristic analysis of similar app
Devise usability testing script
Create prototypes for user testing
Conduct usability tests
Compile findings and recommendations

The Solution

We used the knowledge gained from our usability tests to create an app that users would find more educational and engaging.

Heuristic Analysis

We began by performing a heuristic analysis on Austin Budget Party, an app that allows residents of Austin, TX to explore the process of making changes to their city budget in a game-like format. This helped us to understand what direction we should go with this project by refining our ideas for user goals into two question: did users learn about the content and did users enjoy their experience enough to share?

First prototype, showing that adding funding to Public Safety could lead to three additional police officers

Script & Prototyping

With an idea of ways we could improve the experience, we set about creating a script and some prototypes so that we could perform usability tests. The results of our initial scenarios provided few new insights. By rewriting our script we were able to gain significant insights into user pain points.

Second prototype, allowing users to interact with an improved overview of where funding is going

We also finalized our two prototypes, one aimed at testing education by showing users immediate, relatable feedback of consequences and the second testing engagement by creating a simpler, more game-like interface for our testers to interact with.

Remote Usability Testing

With our script and prototypes ready, we began performing usability testing, both remotely and in a lab. For the remote testing, we used appear.in to share screens with our testers and then recorded their interactions with Austin Budget Party and got their thoughts on our prototypes. This testing showed us that most of our users were unfamiliar with city budgeting, and therefore made sure to read through every 'Learn More' link in order to better understand what they were doing.

Lab Usability Testing

Our lab testing also gave us great insights into how our prototypes worked to address the issues we designed them for. We discovered that our first prototype's emotional impact may have been a bit too strong, with one participant remarking that removing money and seeing that people might lose their job made them feel like they were "doing a terrible thing". We were also told that our second prototype both felt much more like a game and also allowed a better visual of budget planning.

Findings & Recommendations

With all of the data, we then compiled a findings and recommendations report to our client that addressed what we found did well and combined all of those successes into a wireframe proposition for what the app could look like. This would emphasize the visual format that users responded positively towards, as well as displaying the consequences in a slightly more abstract way by comparing relative sizes.