Case Studies
Trans Mentorship Network
Co-designing an online platform to foster connection among trans and questioning people
Individuals of transgender experience face significant hardships in multiple aspects of daily life, and in recent years, trans issues have become a lightning rod in the United States. As rights and access are being eroded, community support and solutions are becoming more important than ever. In this project, we wanted to work with our co-design participant, a trans woman in her late 20s, to explore how we could design a solution to help trans people thrive, one that would authentically center the trans experience.
COVID Exposure Notifications
Understanding users’ experience with and impression of the WA Notify self reporting feature
This study was conducted on behalf of the team behind WA Notify, a mobile application that can anonymously inform users if they may have been exposed to COVID-19. The goal of this study was to explore the user experience of the newly-added “self-attestation” feature on iOS. Based on discussions with the WA Notify team, we wanted to focus on the usability of the feature, but also address how users felt about the application as a whole: whether they found it valuable to themselves and their communities, and whether they understood the inner workings enough to find it trustworthy.
Podcast Daily Routines
A diary study to better understand what role podcasts play in listeners’ daily lives and routines
Podcast listenership has grown in recent years. According to Edison Research, 80 million Americans are weekly podcast listeners as of a report published in March 2021, up from 68 million in 2020. From delivering daily news updates to enriching a monotonous commute, podcasts fulfill a variety of needs for listeners. Despite their popularity, there are few refined best practices or guidebooks for producing podcasts like there are for media like books and film. We set out to examine the lives, habits and preferences of podcast listeners in an effort to help podcast creators create content that fit users’ needs, constraints and interests.