MeowCommunity | Individual Project | 6 weeks
Harmonious Co-living With Cats in HDBs
Process
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Problem Discovery
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Interviews and real-users testing
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Hi-fidelity prototype
Results
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Mobile app prototype that relies on geolocation and user-generated content (UGC) to vitalise the cat lovers community
The Housing Development Board (HDB) received about 1900 cat-related complaints in 2020, 1500 in 2021, and 600 in the first half of 2022 (Lee, 2022).
What can we do to allow cat lovers and non-cat lovers to communicate and collaborate in order to achieve harmonious co-living with cats in their neighbourhood?
Problem Statement
The current efforts to mediate conflicts and issues regarding cats in HDBs are inadequate as there is a long response time and responses are sometimes unsatisfactory.
User personas
As part of the 'Define' phase, I crafted 3 user personas to better visualise the pain points gathered during the user research.​
Mary, 33, Full-time office clerk and cat feeder
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Cat lover
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Feels frustrated when the food she left remains untouched and she cannot find the cat anywhere
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Hopes to have a solution that allows her to track the cat easier and to assure the residents of her block that she will take responsibility for keeping the feeding area clean.
Jeremy, 20, Student
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Cat neutral
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Cares for community cat as he passes by the cat on his way to school every day
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Feels frustrated when he sees an injured cat but is unsure of how to get help
Nadirah, 50, Homemaker
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Cat hater
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Allergic to cats
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Feels troubled by her neighbour cats peeing at her doorstep
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Is afraid of personally confronting neighbour
User research
Conducted semi-structured interviews with 3 individuals
Target Audience
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Community cat carers/ volunteers who live in HDB
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Cat owners who live in HDB
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All HDB residents that have access to a smartphone and internet
User Testing
Goal
Three participants to gain insight on the usefulness of current functions, effectiveness of these functions, and gather feedback on potential new functions.
Participant A, a 20 year old female undergraduate at NUS, is a non-cat lover who is not passionate about cats and has neutral feelings towards them.
Participant B is a 26 year old male, full-time film director, and is extremely passionate about cats although he does not actively interact with the community cats in his estate.
Participant C is a 52 year old homemaker who strongly dislikes cats. She has personally experienced inconveniences caused by her neighbour’s cats and has strong adverse feelings against them.
I then organised their feedback and notes that I have taken down and established three different groups as shown in the figure above.
Results​
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Uncertainty with navigating the interface
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Gap in conceptual model and mental model of users
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Suggestions
Solutions
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Live updates and feedback sharing via community channels.
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Blog posts by professionals to educate and raise awareness on cat caring habits.
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Location-tracking, with permission from the user, to organise their timeline, connect users who are near each other, and send notifications to alert the users of any nearby issues.
Final reflections
Finally, I also conducted my own Heuristics Evaluation of the mid-fi prototype before iterating it to the highest fidelity.
This was a fun project to take on and I believe it will prove to be helpful to users.
However, I agree that there are some usability issues that could be further improved with more time on hand. More functionalities may also be needed for this app to have a stronger value proposition, as opposed to existing alternatives, such as a social media group for instance.