Employees at the City of Austin need to have a centralized location for project data between departments without requiring excess data entry, gives broad overview of all projects happening in Austin, and helps organize documentation for those projects. This is where Moped comes in. However, it has been noticeable that Moped was not being utilized to its fullest potential due to its lack of features that can cater to specific departmental needs.
With this in mind, we decided to focus on the improvement of the interface's usability for all COA employees.
Research + InsightsBefore even getting into designing anything, we conducted research to gather insights from actual employees at COA about the current interface. During this stage we used many different research approach to further investigate the possible issues with Moped such as:
- Competitor Analysis: We looked at tools by other cities like Seattle Open Data and Open ArcGIS to see how they present project information. Then, we explored well-known project management platforms such as Monday, Jira, and Asana to understand what makes them successful.
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- Heuristic evaluations: took a look at the Moped and look for any potential user issues on the interface and if it adheres to the usability heuristics guideline
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- User Interviews: We conducted 1:1 interviews to understand how City of Austin employees perceive and use Moped, uncovering major frustrations around data accuracy, system integration, and lack of documentation. These insights guided our design focus on improving customization, support resources, and integration efforts.
Final Insights Easy to use filters by category, distric,t and project type + advanced search sortsDeviation from Consistency and Standards: nonstandard way of displaying input fields.Frustrations with entering data into multiple placesUsers seem to lack a solid consensus on the purpose of a moped
After gathering all these insights, we moved on with an ideation workshop to think up of some features we would like to include in this redesign and how they would look. At this stage, we began the ideation process with playing around in Figma and create pages that would reflect on what we learned from the research and best align with our goal
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Usability Test: We conducted two rounds of usability testing with City of Austin employees, first using v2 Figma designs to validate our initial direction, then using a functional prototype to assess intuitiveness, ease of use, and whether key challenges were addressed. Insights from the first round informed iterative improvements that shaped the final prototype tested in the second round.
Usability Testing I:
We used our v2 Figma page designs to run a round of usability testing on current COA employees across multiple departments. We aimed to ask them to perform tasks both on the current Moped designs and to imagine how they would accomplish the same tasks using our redesigns. We wanted to understand how users currently interacted with Moped and to see if our initial design direction was on the right track.
PrototypeAfter the first round of usability testing, we gathered, synthesized, and analyzed the results. Using these insights, we began developing the final prototype for the second round of usability testing.
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Usability Testing II: In the second and final round of usability testing on the functional prototype, we aimed to see if the design felt intuitive and whether the main challenges had been addressed. We wanted to understand how easy it was to learn and use for users' needs and their tasks. Most importantly, we wanted to ensure that nothing is confusing and we are not missing any key elements.
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