LinkNYC x Coney Island
Designing in public space that creates connected communities
This project was conducted to explore how LinkNYC could improve the experience of living in or visiting a neighborhood. My team chose Coney Island as a New York neighborhood to focus on and conducted research with residents and business owners to identify unmet needs. From there, my team generated ideas on how the LinkNYC could help neighbors, and iterate on how the user journey illustrates our ideas.
Project Category: The client for this project is Google Venture's investee, Intersection who built LinkNYC throughout New York City. In Spring 2016, this project was done from SVA MFA Interaction Design's Design In Public Space course(Advisor: Jill Nussbaum, Product Design Manager at Facebook).
Team Members: David Al-Ibrahim, Ruth Tupe
My Role: User Experience Design, User Journey, Video Production
What is LinkNYC?
Good-Bye Pay Phone, Hello Link! LinkNYC is a first-of-its-kind communications network that will replace over 7,500 pay phones across the five boroughs with new structures called Links. Each Link provides superfast, free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging and a tablet for access to city services, maps and directions.
CHALLENGE
In Spring 2016, when there were only testing version of LinkNYC and there were not even a beta version of it, Intersection came to SVA's MFA Interaction Design and gave us a challenge, "How can LinkNYC create connected community? How can LinkNYC help local resident and visitor of the town?" Course advisor Jill Nussbaum made 5 teams from the class and asked us to choose and research a town and then design a solution. My team had thought about choosing one between Red Hook and Coney Island. When we had field trip to both towns, Coney Island seemed interesting place and had more phone booth which means there will be more LinkNYC built and more chance to be exposed to people.
ABOUT CONEY ISLAND
Coney Island, Brooklyn, is home to nearly 35,000 people. It has beach boardwalk with America's first amusement park built in 1897 and baseball stadium for a New York based minor league team. For these reasons, more than 3.5 million visitors take the subway to Coney Island each year. (nyc.gov)
Since Coney Island is a place where most of people visit temporarily for their entertainment, my team found that those people want to enjoy more about the place. At the same time, they don't know what to enjoy since the place is not so familiar to them. Following statement is the problem where we decided to focus on.
ASK TILLY
Your Coney Island Guide supported by LinkNYC
ASK TILLY is a digital solution optimized for LinkNYC in Coney Island. It has an application for a tablet in the Kiosk. It uses LinkNYC's 50 inches LCD to advertise local events, shops and restaurants. Main purpose of this solution is to provide visitors of Coney Island access to city services, maps and directions.
HOW IT WORKS
TILLY FEATURES
Pitch Presentation in front of Intersection
In the pitch, my team received many positive feedbacks such as "insightful", "very detailed features that satisfies the needs of the specific place". Intersection mentioned they will consider what my team had presented to them in the short or long term to improve LinkNYC's user experience.
Design Process
RESEARCH
1. How we picked Coney Island
At first, my team talked about many places in New York City for this project. Among Manhattan, Brooklyn and Bronx, we selected Brooklyn and thought Red Hook and Coney Island seemed interesting place. Red Hook is a place where many local people need support from government. Coney Island is a tour course in New York since they have amusement park, beach and stadium. So we went to Red Hook first.
When we got Red Hook, we found that they don’t have much phone booth. This means LinkNYC has less impact for the community.
At Coney, we found there are many things happen such as entertainment, restaurants with a lot of people. So many local and outside visitors come to Coney Island to enjoy. Most of all, we found there are so many phone booth installed. This means LinkNYC has many thing to do for this community.
2. Desk Research
To better understand Coney Island, my team firstly researched with internet. Coney Island has its official website that describes their facility, history and so on. We also looked at Yelp to see what kind of photo scenes are taken with camera, how people think about the place with Yelp review.
3. User Interview
My team visited Coney Island again to interview people who visited Coney Island. There were many day trippers who are from New York area. Following images are important quotes from those who we interviewed.
SYNTHESIS
1. Key Insights & Target Audience
Based on user interview, I knew that many visitors of Coney Island is Day Tripper from New York. Even if they are from New York, many of them did not know how to navigate in Coney island and what to enjoy for food and amusement. And people who have good memories about Coney Island said there are so many things to enjoy, good food at Nathan's, Cyclobs in amusement park, small and big concert that can be easily seen at boardwalk in the beach.
2. Design Direction
So we wanted to make visitors of Coney Island experience more and better in Coney Island in terms of navigation and memorable activities. Direction of this project was narrowed down to providing meaningful and easy accessible experience to visitors.
DESIGN
1. Brainstorming
Many ideas were brought by brainstorming for giving audiences meaningful and accessible experience.
2. Ideas
After brainstorming, we decided to have four features. Place and Snack bar ideas for audience to find place and navigate easily in Coney. Side Show is advertising events that are held in Coney Island. Lastly, Photo booth is an idea that people can take a photo in LinkNYC and upload and share in Instagram right away. Those shared photos will be shown in LCD as well.
3. User Journey
We made a journey map connecting four different ideas into one story for one person who goes to Coney in a day.
4. UI Sketch
User Interface for Tilly was evolved form sketch to high resolution graphic.
5. Design Fiction
The best thing I learned from my advisor, Jill Nussbaum is that there is a design methodology called design fiction. It is making a story fiction assuming that there is an actor playing in a real world with the product designer designed. It was so powerful tool that it helped Intersection people understood the concept of the product and target audience very easily.