Persona
We needed to make two personas.
The Street SmARTS works with prioritizes property owners who have received Public Works Notices due to vandalism. Instead of repeatedly painting over graffiti or paying fines, these owners have the opportunity to collaborate with muralists and transform their buildings into community assets. From this point, we understood that two types of users can benefit from Street SmARTS: 1. propert owners and 2. muralists. Therefore, we conducted interviews and through affinity mapping we concluded: Lila Callejón, a property owner, and Elisa Sato-Martinez, a muralist.
1. Elisa Sato-Martinez is an established muralist with 27 years of experience. Based on San Francisco, her murals are collaborative and community centric. For Elisa, art is a public service. She believes murals should be accessible, inclusive, and reflective. Each wall she paints becomes a shared story. Despite her accomplishments, Elisa finds the current system for securing mural projects frustrating. Uploading the same files and descriptions for every proposal wastes time. Time that she would rather spend on the creative process or community engagement.
2. Lila first opened the cash register to Saint Sookie in the 90s, and, since then, her small coffee shop has become an intrinsic thread in the tapestry of the SF Sunset district. She always has space in the shop window for another flyer for community events and a donation pot next to the tip jar. However, recurring vandalism has become an issue for Lila. This vandalism is a growing problem that impacts business, particularly when the city issues a Notice of Violation. Another chore on the list, another bulk of paperwork and another expense for a small business.
Visual Communication
Throughout the project, we were certain that we should group Street SmARTS's form into different steps and for some pages give more weight to visual communication in the user's submission's process.
The following is illustrations of these matters, where we incroperated an instruction to measure wall dimensions.
Comparative and Competitive Analysis
This part of the research helped us to contextualise our findings.
We looked at The Bay Area Mural Program, BAMP, which is in Oakland with great web design and accessible content. Their colour pallete fused out choices from Street SmARTs original colours. The Chicago Mural Project was the next related analysis with detail inclusive projects and lastly Paint The City which is local to San Fransico. Their project is very creative and also include maps pinning their activity.
