Flock

A user-centered App to connect
local communities

About the project

The Challenge

Digital spaces meant to connect neighbors often do the opposite. Platforms like Facebook, NextDoor, and Citizen are filled with misinformation and unmoderated hostility. What begins as a simple post about a lost dog can quickly spiral into complete derailment.

As someone who values community, I found myself frustrated. Why was it so hard to connect with neighbors without wading through spam or drama?

I set out to design a space where users could create a positive relationship with their local community.

My role

UX Design & Research

Timeline

Jan 2025 to May 2025

Tools

Figma | Qualtrics | Adobe CC

The Process

Define

Research

Prototype

Test

Design

Defining the problem

Problem Statement

Engaging with our local community can be overwhelming, unstructured, negative, and lack accountability. This results in unstructured and unproductive community engagement via online forums, where discourse often devolves into argument. There is an opportunity to improve this online discourse and produce neutral/positive community engagement with an application that structures communications, incentivizes positive community action, and organizes information about the community.

Empathy Map

Research & Context

User Survey

The goal of the survey was to understand how adults currently engage with their local communities through digital platforms, what features and tools they find most useful, and what frustrations they commonly face. The survey was designed to determine which platforms users preferred, their priorities when using those platforms, and current pain points they were experiencing with those platforms.

Users’ priorities

Users were asked what priorities they had when using digital platforms to connect with their local community.

Users’ Most-Used Features

Users were asked which features they used the most when using digital platforms to connect with their local community.

Platform usage

Users were asked which platforms they currently used the most to access information about their local community.

Heuristic Evaluation

The heuristic evaluation aimed to uncover usability issues in existing community platforms like Ring, Facebook, and Nextdoor by applying Nielsen Norman’s 10 usability principles. The goal was to identify patterns that lead to confusion, emotional fatigue, or mistrust such as poor visual design, lack of feedback, or restricted user control. These insights helped establish a usability baseline and informed early design decisions for Flock, ensuring a more structured, accessible, and supportive user experience. By evaluating where these platforms fell short, I was able to prioritize features that enhance clarity, reduce cognitive load, and incentivise positive community engagement.

Key Insights

Current User Needs

  • Clear, trustworthy information about local events, safety, and resources

  • A way to connect with neighbors without the fear of negative responses

  • Efficient tools for finding and organizing community events

  • Motivating systems (e.g., points, badges) to encourage real-world participation

  • Interfaces that are intuitive and clear

  • Ability to customize notification preferences and privacy settings

Current Pain Points

  • Hostile comment threads

  • Misinformation and poor moderation make question reliability of information

  • Users hesitate to post questions or concerns for fear of public shaming

  • Information is unstructured and finding events or resources requires too much effort

  • Overloaded UIs with unclear hierarchy

Design Opportunities

  • Replace chaotic comment threads with structured, moderated conversation blocks or limited responses

  • Introduce reward system for attending events or completing civic actions, the incentivize positive community engagement and user accountability

  • Simplify information architecture and clarify visual hierarchy using card-based layouts and search filters by location/type

  • Onboarding that asks about notification preferences and engagement goals to curate experience.

Prototyping

With clearly defined user needs and pain points in hand, I began sketching out ways to structure the Flock experience. Each screen and interaction is meant to address a challenge found in the research or a usability flaw found in existing platforms.

Preliminary Sketches

I began with some preliminary wireframe sketches that laid out key screens: the user feed, dashboard, rewards, maps, and event details. Getting some

Storyboards

The following storyboards depict key user scenarios based on insights from interviews, personas, and journey mapping. They illustrate how users might discover, engage with, and benefit from the Flock platform, highlighting moments of motivation, friction, and opportunity along the way.

Scenario:

User gets recommendations from others

Scenario:

User finds an event, attends, and redeems rewards

Scenario:

User reports a road hazard

Low-Fi Prototype

This low-fidelity prototype was designed to translate these insights into a tangible interface. Informed by user interviews, surveys, and heuristic evaluations, this prototype prioritized clarity, and mapped out 4 key user flows. The goal of the wireframes was to quickly test how core features like the event discovery, hazard reporting, and rewards redemption could be structured in a way that feel intuitive, logical, and motivating to users.

FIND REWARDS USER FLOW

REPORT A HAZARD USER FLOW

ACCOUNT CREATION USER FLOW

FINDING AN EVENT USER FLOW

Usability Testing

To test usability of the Low/Mid-Fidelity Flock App screens, I conducted observed think-out-loud sessions with 3 participants who represent varying levels of technological proficiency and community engagement. The goal of these sessions was to uncover any usability issues, points of friction, or any potential design improvements. The results of this report will inform the design decisions made in the final high-fidelity prototype.

Key takeaways

  • Placement of home button in bottom navigation feels unintuitive. More important navigation links should be stationed near screen edges for easier access.

  • Logical and intuitive interface, but could benefit from additional pop-ups as methods of confirming actions.g users to memorize content at the top of the page.

  • Addition of user-inputted post title for posts would prevent users from omitting details from the description, given it is the only free-form text-field.

  • Rewarding users for posting could encourage excessive posting.

  • Displaying results under search criteria is less logical and requires a longer scroll

  • Back buttons and modals would assist in error recovery

  • More engaging visual design could help retain users

Design Opportunities

  • ERROR RECOVERY:
    Two participants noted the absence of any “back” mechanism and the lack of confirmation pop-ups/modals that could prevent mistakes when registering for an event or posting. While there is a “post confirmation” screen, this same idea does not extend throughout the app, leaving users. In the final design, modals, pop-ups, and back buttons will be added where applicable.

  • EXCESSIVE POST PREVENTION:
    Reduce the likelihood of excessive posting by only offering reward points for specific actions, not all posts.

  • SEQUENTIAL INFORMATION STRUCTURE:
    Instead of using long scrolling pages for search results, break up information into a logical sequence of pages that reduces overwhelm and doesn’t require users to rely on memory.

Final High-Fidelity Prototype

Going Forward

Short Term

Additional Post Type Flows

Create the rest of the flows for each type of post, that include relevant forms for each type of post like the lost pet or recommendation seeking flows.

AI Features

Integrate AI features such as moderation for posts to ensure users are following community guidelines, and summaries for high-level overviews of posts.

Travel Mode

Fine-tuning smaller interactions in prototype such as button states, system status indicators, and dropdowns.

Travel Mode

Implement a “travel mode” that could give users access to relevant information when travelling to a destination. Specifically posts around safety and recommendations.

Enhance Social Aspects

Take cues from social apps like Facebook that have helped users communicate social nuances virtually. (adding “reactions”, emojis and other structured/predefined ways of communicating emotions).

Long Term

Business/Org Facing Flows

Design the product as it would be interacted with as a local business or organization, and someone who potentially would be posting discounts, verifying user input, and reliably maintaining posted information about said business or organization.