drone app

Application Design

Summary

drone app is an application designed to use the drone services in one platform and use its capabilities to solve social justice issues. This platform has posed the question that technology has the potential to do good and make the world safer and equal.

The Problem

There are so many people who are living in harmful and difficult conditions throughout the world. This humanitarian crisis is fast-moving, volatile, and complex and it is my belief that drones have the capability of serving these people and saving their lives because they can send food, medical supplies for them. Drones could also assist in keeping people safe by providing security. Despite the wide range of drone usage, still there is not a corporation or any kind of platform to provide all drone services for clients, which can be considered as an existing gap.

Our Solution

In this project, I designed a platform that distributes drones that respond to a world in crisis and engage in social justice issues.

My Role

UX/ UI Designer

User research
Sketching
UI design
Prototyping
Usability testing

Tools

Figma (Screen Design & Prototyping)
Pen & Paper (Sketching)

Duration

6 Months

Study Questions

1. How drones can benefit the world in crisis and respond to social justice issues?
2. How drones can respond and solve social justice issues?

Hypothesis

I believe the drone service platform can be beneficial in four ways:

It can speed up services and potentially save lives because drones are faster than other manned vehicles.
Using drones can save costs, and decrease the cost of proving services that are currently done using more expensive forms of existing transportation.
This platform can offer alternative services, such as documenting ceremonies or talking to elderly people and/or children.
Using drones can create community, help with education and have health workers talk to individuals and assess the situation.

Research

I did the research to understand the most common capabilities of drones and how we can use them to serve people.

Drones can provide medical relief

The role of the drones in this part is to deliver perishable medical samples or life-saving vaccines.

Drones can deliver packages

Drones can deliver lightweight packages. Drones generally use 4-8 propellers and rechargeable batteries to provide thrust and attach.

Drones can serve refugees

Drones can help refugees and organizations serving these people. They can provide for people’s needs, without any limitation in distance. They can reach areas that are hard to access for humans.

Drones can help in education

drones can provide virtual field trips and address the problem of not getting access to specific areas like forests, aquariums, historic places, and buildings.

Drones can serve people in disasters

Drones reduce the overall disaster response time by (up to) 44.46%. This time helps reduce the extent of a potential disaster and it helps save lives.

Drones can help with security issues

Drones automatically fly to the alerted point, to instantly review the situation and provide quick situational analysis.

User Interview

I held interviews with 8 users to obtain in-depth qualitative responses to understand what are their needs and their pain points. In this interview, I asked them questions like, if they would like to replace package delivery with drones instead of other motor vehicles? Have they ever used drone services? Which of the benefits of drone services including fast delivery, cost-effectiveness, and variety of services encourage them to use this technology?

Reported that they would like to replace package delivery by drones instead of other motor vehicles

Reported that fast delivery is the most important benefit of drone services that encourage them to use this platform

Reported that they used drone services

Target Audience

This project has two primary target audiences:

1. For the general services like food and parcel delivery, target audiences are the whole society

2. For the especial services like the ones for solving social justice issues, target audiences are:

People who are in difficult, dangerous, and injustice situations
Individuals and/or organizations who aim to help and offer support

Competitive Analysis

In order to recognize competitors, I performed a competitive analysis to gain insight into their products and how they address the mentioned problem and users' needs. The list of potential competitors included FLYTREX, Flybuy, Drone Delivery, and Wing and I picked FLYTREX and Flybuy to take a closer look at.

FLYTREX

Straightforward
User-friendly interface
Tracking the order

Offers food delivery
Offers limited delivery points

Appropriate training for users to put their order easily
Repeat order if users feel satisfied

Users may cancel their subscription if feel unsatisfied

Flybuy

Fast delivery by drones
Easy navigation

The ordering process is confusing
Offers limited items for delivery

Offers different types of delivery options

Because the ordering process is not straightforward, users want to try another app

Empathize

Based on the data I gathered by conducting research and interviewing people I created personas in order to gather human-centered information and identify their needs and their main concern.

Personas

Ahmed

Age: 8
Education: Second grade
Country: Syria
Occupation: Student

Bio

Ahmed and his family have fled their home in Syria because of the war and sheltered in Lebanon. They faced a severe winter in Lebanon and there is not enough clothing and even food for them. Ahmed lost some of his friends in the war and he always has them in his dream that they are playing with each other. He says he missed his school and his friend there.

Goals

Needs food, warm clothing, blanket, and medicine
Needs a place for education and also entertainment
Needs community/friends

Frustrations

Concerned about winter since the wind doesn’t stop blowing.
He has bad dreams and nightmares and he wants to be busy and stop thinking about the bad things

Mariana

Age: 40
Education: Bachelor of education
Country: Haiti
Occupation: School teacher

Bio

Mariana is a school teacher in a small village in Haiti called Manish. The hurricane destroyed all the homes and now some of the families are sheltered in the school. They need food, medicine, and clothing, but since this village is hard to access it seems donation organizations forgot to help them.

Goals

Need to connect organizations to people living in this village to receive donations
Basic needs include food, clothing, medicine.
Requesting temporary appropriate shelters
Need sustainable, safe, and long-term housing

Frustrations

Their village is remote and hard to access. organizations forgot about them and donations didn’t happen
Organizations are slow to respond, disorganized, and can’t help everyone

Bio

Sarah is a social worker at UNICEF. She is trying to help people in South Sudan who don’t have food. These people have to harvest and eat wild grasses. Thousands of children and their families are living in this severe situation. They do not have access to healthy food and risk starvation, death, and disease. Sarah believes that drones can provide food and other basic needs very quickly because they are not limited by distance.

Goals

Sarah

Age: 26
Education: Master degree in Law
Country: U.S
Occupation: Social worker at UN

Life-saving supplies like ready-to-use therapeutic foods, treatment, micronutrient supplements, sanitation products.
Drones to transfer these products to people in the villages.

Frustrations

Help and assistance is happening too slow since some of the villages are hard to access
Not enough available drones for serving people in this area

User Stories

To grasp a better understanding of the scope of the project and identify key features of the app, I created user stories based on the feedback I got from interviews and personas.

High priority user stories

As a user, I want to use drones for different services like delivering healthcare packages or helping me on my farm with pesticides, not only for ordering my food or my coffee.
As a user, I want to use the app and order drones even when I'm not online or don't have access to the internet.
As a user, I want to know which kind of drone can be the best option for me based on the service that I need to use.

Medium priority user story

As a user, in case of disaster or hardship situations, I like to use financial aid and use the drone services.
As a user, I like to help people who need to use drone services but due to financial hardship, they can't pay for it.

Affinity Diagramming

I was overwhelmed by a huge amount of information, so, I organized items into logical groups with the help of affinity diagramming. Below are the affinity diagram created in the miro board based on the interview results and personas.

Variety of services

Providing life-saving supplies

Providing security

Financial aid

Donating money

Access to hard-to-reach places

Fast delivery

Delivering food

Connecting people

Transferring packages to the villages

Ideate

For the next step, I started brainstorming in order to generate ideas for solving the problem. I designed a user flowchart and then started sketching in order to figure out what kinds of features should I add to this application?

Designing the User Flowchart

This step of my design process began with designing the user flowchart. Based on the information I got from interviews and the personas and what they need and what they may expect to see in this platform, doing research and takeaways from affinity diagraming, I designed the user flowchart of the application.

Key Insights

The features that I came up with include:

Drone services
Donation
Financial aid
Phone call
Order history
Tracking the order

Designing Paper Wireframing

At this step, based on the user flowchart, I completed the wireframing process on the paper for the initial sketching of the screens. My main focus in this step was to figure out what kinds of functions should be available on each screen, what are the priorities of the information and functions on each screen, and finally what kind of content should I put in each of them.

Digital Wireframing

As I already completed the paper wireframes then I started translating them into a digital format. And I did this transition in Figma.

Create High-Fidelity Design

At this step, I started to create a mockup of the app, which is a high fidelity design that represents our final product. To create mockups, I started using visual design elements like typography, color, and iconography and then working on the user interface or UI design.

Branding and Logo Design

I started the ideation phase by creating some ideas for the brand of the app. After getting feedback for this part I chose “drone app” for the name of the app. Then I started to ideate for the logo design. I had a couple of ideas for the designing logo of “drone app” and I iterated them then I came up with the following logo design.

Icon Design

For the icon design, I decided to use drones in the designing logos to represent the main symbol of the app which is using drones in crises. The following shows the icon I designed for the donation screen and the icon I designed as a thumbs-up icon.

High-Fidelity Design

Now that I have all of my sketches and elements, it's time to bring them into my design tool. Following are the final interface I designed for this app and I provided explanations for a few of them.

Initial Screens

The next page is the homepage which is one of the main screens of the app. In homepage, users are able to start the ordering drone process through this screen.

Select your drone services here

Navigation Bar:

Home
Order
Services
Payment

Homepage Screen

Options Provided in the Hamburger Menu

Donation option in the hamburger menu

One of the best options in the hamburger menu is the option of donation. At this part, users can donate any amount of money if they would like to help any organization or person who needs to use the drone services provided in this app but they can’t pay for these services.

Donation Screen

Users can start the ordering drone process on the homepage and also in the status bar. As shown in the following, they can choose the drone services, type of drones they need, number of drones they need, etc.

Drone Services Screen

The last option in the navigation bar is the payment method tab. In this tab, users would be able to select the type of payment that they would like to use. Also, there is an option in this tab for applying for financial aid.

Financial Aid Screen

Usability Testing

To gather feedback on the digital experience that I designed and make sure the users can navigate the application and implement tasks based on the user stories and flow, I conducted online moderated tests via Zoom. I recruited 8 persons aged 18-60. Each session was between 15-20 minutes. I shared the Figma link with them for usability testing. While the users were navigating the application based on the tasks I asked them, I observed their interactions with the prototype. I also asked them some question regarding the prototype of the application. They gave me valuable feedback on the prototype at the end of each session.

Tasks

I asked the users to navigate the application to complete the following tasks:

Task 1- As a new user, open the app and sign up.
Task 2- As a new user, select one of the drone services, type of drone needed and complete the process of ordering drone.
Task 3- As a new user, donate $25 to any organization.
Task 4- As a new user, apply for financial aid.

Interview Questions

Does the prototype do what it is meant to do?
Is the navigation sensible and intuitive?
Could you identify the 2 main features of this app?

How would you describe your overall experience with the drone app?
What features do you find most valuable in the application and why?
What features do you find not very appealing and why?
Do you recommend the drone app to your friends/family?

Usability Test Outcomes

Summary of the results from the usability testing:

All users completed the tasks.
Some of the users were confused the options provided in the navigation bar.
The users gave useful feedbacks to improve their experience.

Iterations

1- During the usability testing sessions, and also users feedbacks, I noticed users were spending more time finding the donation option and some of the users checked the payment option in the navigation bar to find this option. So, I decided to move this option somewhere close to the payment which can make more sense. Then I decided to delete the hamburger menu and also the payment option in the navigation bar and combine all the options provided in these two, in one option in the navigation bar, called settings.

Delete the payment option from navigation bar

Delete the hamburger menu

Combine all the options provided in the hamburger menu and also payment method in one option called settings in the navigation bar

As it is shown in the images above, in the new design of the application, I provided the settings option and in this option, users are able to see their profile and edit it if they would like to.

2- I deleted the services option in the navigation bar because users have access to the drone services in the homepage.

Delete the services option in the navigation bar and having access to this option form homepage

3- I also change the name of the order option in the navigation bar to history, which can make more sense and make it more meaningful. So, in this option, users can check the history of their previous orders.

Change the name of order option in navigation bar to history

What’s Next?

Doing usability test again to test the new design of the application.
Greater depth of interactivity including animation, sound, video, and graphical interactions that drones could intervene
Websites and projected poster