About
For this team project, we were asked to design an online community, one that we could potentially create. The topic or focus of the online community can be anything, but the goal is to create a site that people would actually use. We needed to describe both the social and technical features of the site, including how they interact to produce the processes we are trying to encourage.
The imagined audience for this document is an investor whom we were trying to convince to give us seed funding. With that in mind, we needed to make arguments about how there is a real need for this community, how our socio-technical design will work, and how our design will be effective.
What and Who:
Flush’d is an online community where students at the University of Michigan can share reviews on bathrooms they encounter and/or use, form sub-groups based on similar identities, and promote accessibility by providing a platform for users to share and access detailed information about the accessibility features of bathrooms.
Encourages public health hygiene & facility improvement
Encourages sense of community
Users can rate, review, & report issues
In a lighthearted manner, Flush’d provides an online community for UM students to easily talk about their experiences accessing UM bathrooms while also utilizing those discussions to further improve UM public health, hygiene, and accessibility in the physical world.
Competitive Analysis
During the research and development of Flush’d, we took a look at the existing market to see what other competitors existed in helping users find restrooms. We conducted a competitive analysis to evaluate how competitors succeeded and what areas they could improve. This research would serve as inspiration during the design process, as well as inform us of how Flush’d can stand out from competitors.
User Scenarios
The following user scenarios show potential Flush’d users, a gender non-conforming individual looking for a bathroom, and a dorm student looking to file a maintenance complaint for the bathroom. These scenarios are designed to help understand how users may discover and engage with the app.
Design
Why Flush’d?
Our main priority is to keep the members of Flush’d and their identities safe by imposing numerous rules and guidelines that follow our code of conduct and help ensure a respectful and civil online community for everyone. We broke down our ethical policies into four categories: sensitive zones, private history, anonymity/pseudonymity, and content policy.
Social platforms often face many difficulties in ensuring a safe environment for their users, but with Flush’d’s extensive set of rules and tools, we hope to make our online community a place where everyone can feel safe to express their concerns.
