PokeMap: Make Customized City Maps and Meet with People Alike for Migrant Workers
Social migration is a growing trend in China, with over 350 million migrant workers in 2020. Besides urbanization, the main driver is to make better living in metropolitan areas with more opportunities, economic growth and public services. In the mean time, 67.3% of the migrant workers reported to encounter social problems such as housing, education, adaptation and other psychological issues.
How to facilitate migrant workers to better explore the city, make new friends to assimilate to maintain mental well-being? As co-founder of PokeMap, I co-led the product development and led the UX team to design the entire app including: map creation, search, profile, messaging and etc.
TEAM
Zhiwen Qiu, Razi Zhang
DURATION
2020.10 - 2021. 03
PROJECT TYPE
Professional, Zhongke Yitian Info & Tech Corp.
Social Problems of Migrant Workers
The major social problems are housing (15%), low income (21.7%), poor social welfare conditions (7.4%), lack of career development (20.9%) and difficult to assimilate into society (30.6%). Migrant workers have strong travel and social needs, such as making new friends, looking for planned routes to visit and learn more about places and products they want to consume.
What Does PokeMap Do?
According to literature, there are four dimensions of assimilation including the economic integration, behavior adaptation, cultural acceptance and social identity of the mainstream. PokeMap aims to expedite social assimilation process of migrant workers in metropolitan areas for better mental wellbeing by making customized maps to explore the city, and connect to people with similar interests.
Methodology
We did first round interviews with ten users in Shanghai to learn how they use current map apps such as Baidu Map and Google Maps to plan their daily activities, travel iteneray and social network. The demographics spans five provinces of China, aging from 20-35. The findings helped to develop second round interviews and send out surveys to analyze quantative data. The techniques include interviews, focus group, log study and online surveys. Sample interview questions are:
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Walk us through a typical process of how you use BaiduMap and other social apps to plan your trip?
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How do you find interesting places and routes to travel? Who do you usually go with?
User Persona
The main user needs are: 1) they do not know where to explore in the city; 2) they are confused on how to optimize routes for list of places to visit; 3) they want to find friends to go out together. The findings led to the development of two distinct user-types: City Explorer and Find Friends with Similar Interests
User Workflow
The workflow design of PokeMap centralizes on the two personas: city explorers and friends making.
Solution
We then sketched out solutions for system design and prototypes. The PokeMap product has three major features:
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Search, Recommendation, POI categories;
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Map exploration and creation: include find place, route and related details;
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Social networking: user profile, follow system and messaging.
The system combines messaging service where each message is assigned a GroupChatID to the server that can handle messages, and deliver messages to different connections handling those for other users, and map service, where it needs to track user location in real-time for navigatation and to process the route for each place on the itinerary.
Explore PokeMap
Combining Exploring & Socializing Experience
Map Creation
Simplifying Adding and Editing Processes
