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Organizing a Co-Mapping Experience: Launching Mapeo

Year:

2018

CLIENT:

Digital Democracy

Role:

Lead UX Researcher & Designer

Categories:

UX Research, Design Systems, XFN Collaboration, Design Leadership

How might decentralized tech and smartphones help remote frontline communities securely and intuitively collaborate on mapping?

Remote indigenous communities needed mapping tools to defend their ancestral lands. As lead UX researcher and designer for Digital Democracy, Puicón-Pérez conducted 3 contextual inquiries, 3 heuristic analyses, and interviewed 3 mapping SMEs to begin shaping a digital mapping toolset.

Research insights informed the core design system and guidelines for Mapeo — an intuitive and accessible co-mapping platform designed for secure collaboration. Features included geocaching annotated observations, securing data offline, and sharing securely.

Since launching in 2018, over 30 frontline communities used Mapeo to create maps for their defense.

Mapeo is available through the Google Play Store.

Co-designing with Communities & Facilitating Collaboration

Prioritizing a human-centered approach, Puicón-Pérez collaborated with members of 5 indigenous communities over 2 years to co-design Mapeo. They conducted 2 field visits, 3 contextual inquiries, and 3 heuristic analyses to uncover user needs and insights. In addition, Puicón-Pérez facilitated 2 participatory design workshops with the Digital Democracy tech team, synthesizing research findings to validate core features like Observations.

Puicón-Pérez drove effective collaboration across disciplines during Mapeo's development, helping to roadmap key MVP features and leading weekly design sync-ups via Zoom. During this time, Puicón-Pérez also facilitated in-person and remote workshops for the full 9-person team. Their insight synthesis and systems thinking strengthened team efforts despite startup constraints.

By continuously aligning on goals and principles, Puicón-Pérez enabled streamlined workflows and issue resolution, helping the team to deliver a human-centered product.

Implementing a Human-Centered Design System

Mapeo’s core audience were non-English speakers with low to moderate tech savviness. Taking insights gathered through field visits and user interviews, Puicón-Pérez shaped a set of human-centered design guidelines that prioritized hardware limitations, ergonomics, and adaptability to multiple languages.

After prototyping and validating Mapeo’s core product experience in the first four months, Puicón-Pérez shifted to shaping its design system based on the established design guidelines. This included producing key interface components and graphical assets to help the tech team further implement additional features within the product.

In all, Puicón-Pérez’s work on Mapeo’s design system has stood the test of time with the product being used by over 30 frontline communities in Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania and the Americas.

Generating High-fidelity Mockups for Remote Testing

Arriving at an initial core experience for Mapeo required several interface explorations over the course of four months.

Taking the insights gathered during field visits and contextual inquiries, Puicón-Pérez worked closely with the Digital Democracy team to identify key interaction flows and interface elements. Then leveraging their visual design skills, Puicón-Pérez translated these requirements into testable mockups used for remote user testing with 5 end users across 2 indigenous communities.

Feedback gathered from team members and end users shaped the overall experience into an intuitive and accessible product experience particularly for non-English speakers.

Featured Work

Considering Cooperation: A Design Framework

UX Research, Design Frameworks, Design Artifacts

Organizing a Co-Mapping Experience: Launching Mapeo

UX Research, Design Systems, XFN Collaboration, Design Leadership

A. Puicón-Pérez

UX Research & Design

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