Overview

For our semester project, we were given the CHI 2019 Student Design Competition Prompt to create something that "weaved the threads within the social fabric". From this prompt, we decided to create an online platform for formerly incarcerated individuals (returning citizens) that can connect them with returning citizens who have successfully reintegrated into society. This product was created with the framework of rehabilitating incarcerated individuals so they can return and thrive post-incarceration.

Problem Description and Solution

• Formerly incarcerated people often lack support systems and face barriers to entry back into society, which often results in recidivism and reincarceration. Without support and a strong plan back into a stable life post-incarceration, many formerly incarcerated individuals must face these problems alone.
• We aim to strengthen society by helping this group of marginalized individuals overcome these barriers and successfully become functioning members of society once more.

User Groups

1. Mentees: Formerly incarcerated individuals (returning citizens)
2. Mentors: Formerly incarcerated people who have “successfully” reintegrated into society. Successful can mean different things, but these are people who feel like they can offer advice to help others.

Design Process

Competitive Analysis

Primary Competitors: Second Chance Jobs for Felons, Help for Felons, exoffenders.net

Secondary Competitors: Pigeon.ly, sponsorsinc.org, The University of Michigan App

Within the competitive analysis, the criteria we will examine was ease of use/level of accessibility, trustworthiness, language level, quality of information/information accuracy, and searchability.

Persona and Scenarios

Our team created four personas, with the first three as mentees with differing education and technological literacy levels and the last as the mentor.

User Flow

We are going to be focusing mainly on the mentor/mentee relationship aspect of the website for the wireframes, and there will hopefully be 30 interactions or less for that portion. On the user flow, the blue sticky notes represent the wireframes.

Paper Prototyping

In order to quickly and easily create iterative designs and layouts for the online platform, we developed these paper prototypes. This is the final paper prototype we developed after two iterations.

Digital Wireframing

V1 example

Through these wireframes, we got tons of feedback about information heirarchy, user flow, and the general aesthetics of the product.

Final Product

Mentee Final Prototype.

Mentor Final Prototype.