Community Based Design with Youth Radio

Community Based Design with Youth Radio is a project with two central goals: The first was to work with the Youth Radio students and staff to teach them the user-centered design process as it relates to mobile development. The second goal was to use this process to help conceptualize, plan, and develop a mobile application involving Oakland-based youth to improve interactions with police. Over a period of four months, we visited Youth Radio and worked directly with their Mobile Action Lab team.

We worked with the Mobile Action Lab to focus their topic of development, introduce them to the design process and presented a competitive analysis on the mobile market in relation to their interests. We then went on to teach the basics of user research, facilitated interviews with potential users, partners and stakeholders and from this synthesized the most salient needs into a use case. Lastly we worked with the team to identify a feature set, taught a lesson on mobile prototyping, and iterated on a number of interactive prototypes. The result of our work is be a model for them to use user-centered design techniques in the future, along with an interactive prototype that can be used to further test with users and develop into a fully working application.