LINH NGUYEN

Heritage Burnaby Interactive Map

UX/UI Design / User Research / Product Design

An interactive historical map on the Heritage Burnaby website, shaped by stories from the community, marking the memories and evolution of Burnaby’s landscape and its landmarks over the past 100 years.

Cover of heritage burnaby project

My Role

  • User Researcher
  • UX/UI Designer
  • Interaction Designer

Team

  • Jaxine Kurniawan
  • Lori Jiang
  • Kim Phan
  • Keerat Mahil
  • Zhaniya Yeltindinova

Duration

  • 12 weeks - Fall 2023

Overview

This is a senior-level interaction design course in which the team had a chance to find and partner with Heritage Burnaby, which is an online repository for Burnaby's historical archives, with the goal of promoting knowledge and exploration of Burnaby's history and building community bonds. In initial discussions, curator Kate Petrusa voiced the museum’s interest in reviving the map.

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Jump to the final design ↓

Problem Space

In the initial meeting minute from June 2009, it is outlined that the Charting Change Atlas was made in order to "better serve Burnaby's citizens by providing more opportunities to learn about the City's heritage and history."

The old charting change atlas

The map was initially popular but gradually lost its audiences and became inactive. In our interview with Kate - the museum curator, the museum is interested in re-purpose the use of this map to attract citizens again.

Discovery

User Testing & interviews

In order to understand the reasons why users are not motivated to engage with the map like when it was released, the team decided to conduct user interviews with prospective users of the map to find out their frustrations, needs and goals with the existed map.

  • Format: in-person usability testing with think-aloud method and semi-structured interviews
  • Participants: 3 Burnaby residents interested in Burnaby's history, 1 history student, and 1 museum researcher

Synthesizing Research Data

Although we gained a valuable amount of feedback from the interview, when I sat down to synthesize the information, I decided to set aside the comments about the unappealing UI and focus more on their experience and emotions while navigating the map:

  • Users find it is unnecessary to use the map nowadays because they can always find information by googling.
  • The difficult navigation and unappealing interface of the maps cause frustration to the users.
  • The exclusive information and photos from Heritage Burnaby are informative and useful for users to understand a heritage site.

As we need to send the insights to Kate, I turned this information into a user journey to present to her, as I believe it helps her visualize our process and the target audience better. The user journey also serves as a starting point for our team to discover opportunities.

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Based on the insights and the user journey, we decided to put the need for inteventing a completely new way to revive the maps instead of just updating the user interface to be better. We then framed our design statement to explore opportunites to raise the map's engagement.

Define

How might we personalize the interactive map while retaining it’s historical/informational value to increase people’s interest and engagement with the map?

Develop

Participatory Workshop to Brainstorm Solutions

To promote innovation and ensure intended users' needs are met, the team host a workshop with 5 participants: 3 Burnaby residents interested in Burnaby's history, 1 history student, and 1 museum supervisor.

I structured the workshop activities based on our goal: to foster creativity in participants. The activities progressed from introducing them to the map to letting them rank the design concepts and add their thoughts, allowing us to gather real-time feedback on their attitudes toward design decisions.

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Participatory Workshop insights

“I think it’s supposed to be a story map, but it just looks like a regular map with historical information”

The team initial concept was to gamifying the map so people can rank by uploading historical site’s images onto the map. However, the workshop helps us realize that photos are not enough, the community cares about stories. It also makes us realize that we also need to consider the back-end process for the museum staffs - the ones that need to approve uploaded content.

The old charting change atlas
The old charting change atlas

Story sharing is favoured by Burnaby residents!
A participant from the workshop led me to discover a Facebook group called Burnaby Nostalgia with over 10,000 members. Members shared photos and memories of historical and recreational sites and hundreds of likes and comments were being exchanged daily. This evidence drove me to propose transforming the map into a community story-sharing platform, integrating protected historical sites and beloved local spots.

Deliver

Proposed Solution

We redesigned the map into a community-driven story map, integrating local stories. By attracting visitors through personalized storytelling, the map allows anyone with a connection to Burnaby to share their stories and photos connected to historical landmarks on the map, which was a solution validated by findings from our participatory workshop.

Community Stories

New landing page features the story map of a collective history, where people can share their memories associated past and present landmarks across Burnaby.

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Story Submission - User Side

Streamlining story submission for both users and client through easily accessible submission page. Including word count and photo limit to ensure concise, impactful stories.

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Story Submission - Client Side

Heritage Burnaby administration team can manage posts submitted by community members. Allowing the administrative staffs to accept or decline submissions, providing emailed feedback to users.

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Historical Information

Keeping historical context of landmarks in a separate tab from community-stories, since it was a positively viewed feature of the original map. Slider added for more control over desired date range..

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Marketing

Promotion on Heritage Burnaby website and associated partner websites such as Burnaby Village Museum and City of Burnaby, as well as social media.

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Reflection

Due to time constraints, we prototyped a minimal viable product for our client and did not have time to carry out usability testing to validate our design. However, conducting usability testing and developing more engaging ways for users to interact with the map's information would be my next step in furthering the project.