Connect is a social App that designed to help improve neighbor relations and to build stronger, safer, happier communities.
Introduction
Over 200,000 neighborhoods in the world are using social platforms where neighbors work together to build stronger communities. Research shows that the better our relationship with those around us, the more sense our community becomes. As a result, our quality of life improves.
These are not tangible benefits but social and psychological benefits that improve our daily lives when it comes to neighbor relations. Connect is designed to help improve poor neighbor relations and to build stronger, safer, happier communities.
Challenge & Goals
Problem statement
When I was younger, I lived downtown in a neighborhood called Florentin. During the years this neighborhood, the relationships with the people in it, and the sense of community you get from everything around you turned into precious memories I wasn't able to recreate anywhere else I lived. Since that time, I was trying to understand what was so special about those days, and how the sense of community I felt impacted my life. Connect was born from these feelings.
During my research I came across the study of Susan J. Farrell, Tim Aubry, and Daniel Coulombe, from the University of Ottawa (2003), researching the contribution of neighborhoods and neighbors to personal well-being, and then I realized, I experienced the same thing when I was living in Florentin.
Challenge
My challengewas to translate those feelings above, caused naturally due to personal interaction into a digital experience.
Problem Definition
Poor neighborly relations have a negative effect on residential well-being.
Goals
My main goal was to help people interact with their neighbors, focusing on building this amazing feeling you get when you are a part of something bigger, a community. (1) Increased feeling of safety, (2) Improving personal well-being.
Sense of community
Research
The purpose of the research was to understand the relationship between neighborhood characteristics and personal well-being as mediated by a sense of community and neighboring behavior. Many studies conducted over the past three decades show that the sense of community in a person's life has a positive psychological influence that directly affects his or her personal well-being. In Israel, there is still no significant progress on the subject, and there are no products in the Israeli market that provide a good response to the characteristics that are capable of creating a sense of community that encourages interpersonal interaction among tenants, regardless of the use of groups in Facebook or WhatsApp.
"The prediction of well-being by sense of community is consistent with past research that found that feelings of membership, need fulfillment and shared emotional connection - contributed to personal coping and overall health (including subjective well-being) of community members"
Survey
A survey of 60 participants aged 20-50 living in the city of Tel Aviv found that over 90% of the respondents live in an apartment building. 18.2% of them do not know any tenants in the building, while 42.4% know between 1-3 tenants. This is despite the fact that 65% of the respondents have an elevator in the building where most of the interpersonal exposure takes place.
When asked what they think is the reason why they do not have interpersonal communication with their neighbors the leading answers were related to the short period of time they live in the apartment and the rate of turnover of the neighbors.
The answer of one of the respondents noted caught my attention, he said that he does not keep in touch with the neighbors as there is no situation of initial interaction without initiative from one of the parties. A lake of interaction opportunities is one of the problems that I was passionate to solve.
Ideation workshop
Connect was inspired by McMillan & Chavis definition of a sense of community. The App design was created to support those 7 elements; Similarity in values, influence on others, availability to help, social acceptance, perceived boundaries, safety, and shared history.
Sketches and features
Onboarding with Facebook
We want everyone in our community to feel safe and secure, sign in with Facebook will make sure that everyone here are real persons. Your address will use to create your inner circle, aka your neighbors.
Neighborhood feed
Stuck without eggs? here you can catch up with everything and everyone around you. From public records like crime reports, neighbour discussions or photos people have taken in your neighborhood.
The circles
We call them circles, they are everywhere around you, all you need to do is take a look. Chess? Sport? Cooking? The circles will help you get together with real people that share the same interest as you are.
Social acceptance
As part of the onboarding process, a user can either be the first to create a community address (validated by city, street, and number) that doesn't exist or join one that already is by acceptance of one of the community member's.
Availability to help
An entire lend and borrow section was designed as part of phase two, In order to gain the option to borrow from others, the user must upload at least one product that can be lend in return.
