BRIDGING THE BUSH
Design Thinking, UX & UI
Brief
We were engaged as a team of University of Sydney Master’s students to undertake a digital design project prioritising users who were considered part of the digital fringe. The project was in conjunction with Canva as an industry partner, meaning we needed to align our solution with their company values, drive and product offering.
Result
Our design solution, Bridging the Bush, aims to connect LGBTQIA+ individuals living in rural or remote areas to one another. Our initial research highlighted that teens and young adults going through a stage of questioning their orientation or thinking about coming out face issues of mental health and lack access to relevant support and services. Our solution aims at normalising LGBTQIA+ individuals in these more remote locations through an artistic expression interface, gallery to involve the public and open dialogue as well as on-going support through the use of mementos in public and private settings with the aim of indicating safe and accepting environments.
Online Creative Platform (via Canva)
Showing the help prompts for users who are less artistic
Online Gallery
Allowing access to the greater public, not just those in rural areas
Real Life Interactive Gallery
Travels between rural towns and set up in local libraries.
Mementos
Enable the dialogue to remain open & act as symbol of support in public spaces
Medium & Tools
After reading a number of academic papers it became evident that participatory design was the recommended and preferred method when engaging in design solutions for the LGBTQIA+ community. With this in mind we focused our entire design approach around user participation, feedback and iterations. We used the following alongside this overarching theme:
Brainstorming
Interviews
Surveys
Experience Prototyping (workshop)
Decision Matrix & Card Sorting
Sketching -> Mid Fidelity Mockups -> High Fidelity Digital Renders
Design Fiction
Responsibilities
Our team was comprised of 4 team members including myself. We each shared roles throughout the project to ensure we had an equal opportunity to learn new processes as well as to gain unique insights from our individual perspectives on outcomes and feedback given. Each of our team members exhibited unique strengths and experience so we used these strategically to organise our contributions to the project from start to finish, with evaluations throughout the course.
My allocated responsibilities included keeping track of overall progress in order to ensure a smooth delivery before each of the 3 deliverable deadlines. In addition I took on a number of interviews, survey generation, low and mid fidelity prototyping and facilitated workshops.
Example creative expression
Challenges
Throughout the project we came across a number or challenges:
the project was conducted whilst COVID-19 social distancing restrictions were in place, this was a significant limitation in accessing participants and in running safe and valuable workshops.
due to our small pool of participants we faced contradictory findings throughout our design practice and had to use existing literature to support or re-direct our project to ensure the final deliverable was appropriate and user intuitive for our selected area.
one of our biggest challenges was a limited time frame along with limited technological skill set. As a team, we would have benefited from an additional iteration of our solution which was an interactive digital solution as opposed to the paper prototype and design fiction which were presented. Having a working, digital solution and being able to test in remote location would have opened our insights to a deeper level of empathy, definition and feedback surrounding this solutions and its impact at addressing LGBTQIA+ individuals in rural and remote areas.