OVERVIEW

"Livable" is mobile app that helps New York City apartment hunters find the right neighborhood based on what makes it “livable” for you, such as noise complaints, nearest grocery stores, nightlife and access to transportation. Livable uses NYC Open Data and the Google Places API to score each neighborhood based on how you prioritize what matters most to you. 

The idea for this app started as a side project with a group of friends that I worked with at R/GA. We were all experiencing the same problem of trying to find apartments in New York neighborhoods that fit our needs.

ROLE

I led the UX on the project within a small team multi-disciplinary team. We also worked with R/GA's internal Google Labs team for technical guidance working with the Google Places API. I was involved in the entire process from research, sketching, and wireframing, to the final UI designs and implementation. 

DESIGN PROCESS

 I interviewed friends and coworkers to learn what attributes they look for when apartment-hunting in the city.  I then took the most common criteria and filtered it down to 8 categories. The developer, creative directors and I selected the NYC open data feeds we felt were relevant to our categories and used them as input for our scoring system. 

Sketching, Wireframing & Prototyping

During the discovery phase of the design process, potential users mentioned that when they searched for an apartment, they often based their decision on how the neighborhood measured up to their personal priorities. This gave us the idea that the app should assist users with this task. I started sketching out several user task flows for how users could prioritize their needs using our main categories. I then created a few rudimentary paper prototypes and tested the models out on a handful of potential users.  Based on the results of this test we settled on a gesture-based list model, where users could prioritize the categories simply by tapping to hold and dragging the categories up and down the list. 

Next, I moved on to sketching and wireframing the user flows for the overall app. We wanted to keep the app simple, lean, and focused on only a few primary tasks: adding a neighborhood, prioritizing the list of categories, and receiving a score. Beyond the app's basic functional value, I also wanted the app to be playful and fun to use. I brainstormed with the team on how we could make the scoring feature more engaging. We decided to give the user's generated score a little personality. If nightlife was the top priority, they would receive the "Night Owl" badge. Or, if good restaurants and food markets was the primary concern, they might receive the "Epicurean" badge. I went through multiple rounds of wireframing, paper prototyping and user testing before landing on a solid design that I passed off to our visual design and animation teams.  

Visual Design, Animation & Implementation

I stayed heavily involved during the polishing phase of the product, working with the visual design, development, and animations teams to ensure that the overall spirit and brand personality of the experience was unified. Once our visual designs were pixel perfect and the animations fluid, we passed off our work to be implemented by the development team and stayed deeply involved to ensure that the integrity of our designs was met. Livable was an honoree at the 2013 Webby Awards in the Mobile Sites & Apps category and won a Clio Award.