This week our team visited Montrose Grace Place, a drop-in center in Houston we are partnering with, to get feedback from individuals currently/previously experiencing homeless in Houston on our help card. At this stage, we included a short description of services, as well as bus routes to the location. The insights that drove these additions were that when interviewing youth, they often felt uncomfortable trying out going to a new resource because they were unaware what a resource had to offer them, and most all of the youth reported that their main mode of transportation was the bus. Considering these … Continue reading Montrose Grace Place: Test

This week we identified what information we wanted to include in our help card. For the bulk of our weekly meeting, we brainstormed how we can best organize information on the help card. We wanted to build on the previous help card, but this time including a description of each resource’s services so that users can choose which resource they want to go to based on their needs at the time, while also adding Metro routes to each of the locations to help better navigate. Previous help cards made navigation difficult because many housing insecure youth do not have cell … Continue reading Montrose Grace Place: Ideate

The week of Build, our group met twice. After having compiled many of the resources we want to consider including in the helpcard, each team member was assigned several shelters to do research on according to the following criteria: Basic info (address, phone number) What the resource provides Requirements (age, gender, etc.) Transportation information (bus/metro routes) We then moved into prototyping how we would present the information we collected clearly and concisely, taking up the least possible space on a helpcard that must include many resources. Everyone created a low-fidelity prototype, moving from paper to prototypes in Google Docs, and … Continue reading Montrose Grace Place: Build

Approaching the mid-semester review, we wanted to give the community a good summary of the problem we are up against, as well as show everyone how we were planning on approaching our solution going forward in the design process. In our presentation, we wanted to clearly communicate the two major problems our card will address: outdated, irrelevant information, and a lack of helpful navigation information. We also wanted to establish measurable goals, like having our users report using the help card more than once. Lastly, we asked the audience if they could help us with our biggest question: how can … Continue reading Montrose Grace Place: Mid-Semester Review