The Big Picture
The 311 mobile app is a way for New York City residents to access all sorts of non-emergency help and information. Users can check the status of alternate side parking rules, if garbage collection has been suspended, or even whether or not public schools are closed. The largest part of the mobile app, however, is being to make Service Requests directly from the app without having to call 311. Users can file noise complaints, flag faulty heat or hot water in buildings, report potholes, and much more.
As the precursor to some major upgrades to the entire 311 platform, I worked with the NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DOITT) on updates to the app experience from 2017-2019.
My Role
I served as the secondary UX/UI designer on this project, as part of a team of two. I was responsible for the following:
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analyzing data collected by the 311 Customer Experience team from quarterly surveys and customer feedback on Android and iOS app stores
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identifying opportunities to leverage design thinking and improve the app experience
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creating sketches, wireframes, and prototypes to help design and test new features
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providing design assets like images, icons, and colors to our mobile developers
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drafting documentation to aid in the QA of features on both the Android and iOS versions of the mobile app
The Process
During my time on the 311 Mobile team, the app had hundreds of thousands of users across its two major versions. Feedback would trickle in from the review sections on the app stores, from emails sent through the app’s “get in touch” feature, and from large quarterly surveys that would be conducted by the Customer Experience team at the 311 division at DOITT. Our job was both to react to this feedback while also designing new features for the mobile app.
Here are some of examples of my work over the years I worked on the project:
Onboarding
We improved the onboarding process that triggers when users first load up the app to inform them ahead of time about some common issues we were seeing coming up again and again in feedback comments.
The Material Design standards for Android include support for floating action buttons, so we used those. For iOS, we opted a static screen that could be swiped left and right. Below are the two onboarding messages for the respective platforms.
App Permissions
In 2018 there were updates to the way Android apps handled user permissions for accessing things like location services, phone storage, and the phone’s camera. Permissions were now being asked for on a case-by-case basis, rather than just once. We had to have the app display this request for permissions in the least annoying way possible, while giving users the option to switch some kind of “never bother me again” flag.
Linking to The Web
In 2019, because of updates to back-end systems, we temporarily had to link users to the 311 website for certain Service Request forms rather than handling them in-app. This could have been potentially really annoying to our users, so our challenge was twofold: how to make this process as unobtrusive as possible while also making it impossible to miss.
I designed a solution whereby we would reorganize the list of Service Request forms and segregrate all the forms which would become links to the web into their own section. We would also include an optional informational message that could be triggered by tapping the "info" icon.
Sample Documentation
Lessons Learned
During my time on the 311 project I was part of a dedicated product team. Working in three-week Agile sprints we built new features, tested them, and tackled bug requests from previous iterations. This gave me a great amount of experience working on a dedicated team for one product, responding to user feedback in real-time and having to contend with strict deadlines and quick turnarounds on design assets for our mobile developers.