Sowcialise
A university Figma prototype
During a prototyping course at university I was tasked with creating a digital solution to promote urban farming in the city of Stockholm.
I worked in a team of 4 people and created Sowcialise; a social platform where urban farmers from Stockholm can chat, share posts, schedule times and find information.
Screen recording showing main flows and functionality of the system.
Design brief
This project explored how digital services can support and promote urban gardening in Stockholm. Stockholm City aims to encourage urban gardening and investigate how digital tools can add value to these initiatives.
Based on user research, the city identified three key target groups:
young adults interested in sustainable food growing and outdoor social activities,
families seeking meaningful, community-based experiences and opportunities to teach children about nature, and
teachers who want to use urban gardens as an educational resource.
The group had to choose and further specify one of these.
The service should align with Stockholm City’s core values of being active, credible and accessible and follow the city’s visual identity. Inclusivity and accessibility are essential, as is alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals related to ecosystems & biodiversity and health & well-being. The solution should focus on real user value rather than gamification, advertising, or onboarding flows.
Project Goal:
Design and prototype an interactive, testable digital service with realistic content. The project required selecting a clear target group, defining core functionality, naming the service and developing a focused visual and interaction design suitable for user testing.
End users
We started off by picking a target audience to be the end users of the future system.
After resarching, we decided on young adults around ages 20-30. These are people who are possibly in between stages in life such as university and starting a family where they might experience loneliness.
Our system is meant to use socialisation as a way to expand urban farming by making the app informative as well as welcoming to new users and a way to try a new hobby and meet new people.
Interviewing and role prototyping
After deciding on a target audience we conducted interviews with 4 end users. We asked them questions about experiences with social communities and with urban farming.
Afterwards we also researched online and concluded that young adults are interested in having communities and connections outside of the internet and we were going to use urban farming as the backdrop for this.
We created a video prototype showing the role of the system for the end users, where a lonely young man found the app online and started urban farming and created friendships. We also created two different storyboards further illustrating the role of the system.
We examined other platforms meant to promote connection like Facebook, Discord and Instagram to see if the role of our system is filling a gap not currently existing on the market today. With the combination of being a niched topic, urban farming, and abilities to easily schedule appointments and meetups without previous knowledge about the practice we concluded that it does.
Requirements & problems
Based on the previous step, we conducted a brain storming session to find out problems, needs and solutions about our users.
We identified a few different problem and solutions but ultimately decided to move forward with creating a system that helps users discover locations for urban farming, plan activities and communicate with each other.
We then moved forward with brain storming ideas about the layout and look and feel of the system.
Wireframing
For the next step we created low fidelity wireframes for the four main functions of the app that we chose to move forward with;
Social feed
Chat
Map
Scheduling
Visual identity
After deciding on the purpose and functions of the system we created a visual identity for the system.
We chose colors, logo and fonts based on the mission and the client, the city of Stockholm.
Fonts were found on their website and colors and pictures where chosen based on the theme of urban farming and nature.
End result
We followed Apple's design guidelines when creating the app and made sure that all buttons had interactivity. We used the plugin Unsplash for profile pictures, posts and the map. We included a home page where you can sort posts from all farmers in the city or just your friends, as well as post yourself or add new people. A calendar page where you can book appointments for farming, a chat page for communicating with other farmers as well as a map to find urban farms nearby and more information about them.