Case Study: The Community Asset Map

The Challenge: A team approached us with the need to find a way to connect new teachers in New York City to the myriad community and neighborhood assets and organizations that could support their work in schools. This was a critical component to the team’s evolving strategy centered on community engagement and relationship building. .

The design challenge was: "How might we empower teachers to find and connect with neighborhood assets to support their students in all their needs?"

The Approach: We conducted structured UX research interviews and a landscape analysis to better understand the information gap teachers had and how past efforts had faltered. We designed and tested several wireframes with small groups of users and launched a lightweight web-based product using open source tools to test the solution with first and second-year teachers. The tool was later absorbed into the organization’s primary CRM and continues to provide value to teachers and staff today.

For this project we used open source tools from Google and Bootstrap to create a user friendly mobile app that would help teachers, students, parents, and community members connect and share. We worked closely with the client team to empower them to lead their own usability tests to help them better understand how to market the product and prioritize future work.

After launch, we gathered requirements and identified 3 pathways to integrate the data from our shared systems and enable long-term maintenance and support of the product with partner teams.

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