Client
Live XYZ
Year
2024
Services
Product Design, Prototyping, Brand Design
A City of Data: Mapping the streets one place at a time
Live XYZ is an interactive map where every business, space, and event is indexed and searchable. Live obtains its data by sending mappers out into the city to literally walk every block and manually plot every space as a dot on their map. I was hired to design a data intake app for the mappers that is more accurate, efficient, and easier to maintain than the previous system. This meant understanding the existing process, talking with mappers about their experience, and identifying the areas for improvement.
Mapping a city is time consuming, but the goal was to do so as fast and accurate as possible.
A block would get mapped once every 30 days or so. As most places remained the same month to month, the most common action for a mapper was identifying a location as unchanged and simply moving on to the next space. Being the most frequent and important interaction, I built the rest of the experience radiating out from there. Another key issue was that mappers would often input data on the wrong space or create new spaces for somewhere that already existed. To avoid this, I made the name and photo must more prominent on the location cards. I also noticed that several spaces had incomplete information that was often ignored by mappers in the field. To correct this, I added smart prompts that would appear during the flow in order to capture the necessary information, thus filling in all gaps and avoiding the additional step in the future.
Once the new mapping flow was worked out, I built a prototype and tested to see how mappers responded and determine how it would impact the review process.
Mapping was only one side of the project. Once the data was collected, it had to be reviewed and approved in case there were any errors. I created prototypes to test with the founders and select mappers to see how they interacted with the new platform. There were several flows for all of the main actions: No Change, Unsure if Operating, New Business, Vacant, Under Construction, Remove. Each action rendered a “Reported” label on the space to indicate something had been submitted and was awaiting approval. I also created a new admin dashboard process for the approval of incoming data.
An underlying goal was to create a new design system that could easily expanded upon, utilizing many apple standards for faster development, easier upkeep, and ease of use.
This mapping experience was the first step to a larger brand overhaul. Live XYZ used to have a consumer app that allowed users to search its database for places and events. The founders wanted this new mapping tool to look much different from the existing tools. Upon completion of the mapping tool I also helped them with some future concepts which involved reporting tools, dashboards for their clients, and digital street advertisements in partnership with NYC Small Business Services. These additional projects eventually paused to hopefully be picked up in the future.
