Designing in Community: Leveraging In-Person Workshops for Thoughtful Design Solutions

Shift Collective sought a full-scale redesign of Historypin to address a backlog of site improvements. The multistage engagement started with a focus on three main areas of improvement: usability and accessibility for diverse audiences, including Community-Based Archives (CBAs), enhanced storytelling capabilities while supporting data ownership and discoverability, and site and data security

The design team at Exygy uses a methodology we’ve created called Thoughtful Design which integrates the best principles of numerous design frameworks like Human Centered Design. We believe that the practices of Thoughtful Design culminate in our best effort to design for all users. (For more on Thoughtful Design visit https://www.exygy.com/thoughtful-design) From the outset of our work with Historypin, our work was underscored by the four main principles of thoughtful design: recognize exclusion, center for the margins, invite people with lived experience to co-create, and design for user’s cognitive and emotion states.

All our engagements begin with conducting comprehensive user research to deeply understand user needs, expectations, and behaviors. With Historypin, we were able to conduct some of that work in person at a workshop they were hosting in New Mexico. Our design team leveraged this convergence of Community-Based Archives (CBAs) that contribute to the work of Historypin to uncover pain points, expectations, and user-needs. For example, our product manager and designer led an interactive workshop focused on how CBAs group their data and how they want to organize and/or categorize data. This has led us to draft some early categories for collections which should support our search and filtering with the ultimate goal of increasing discoverability of content. We observed how CBAs interact with archives and Historypin and identified usability barriers to the existing Historypin interface and mobile experience.

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Our design workshop not only gathered vital information for our research but also created trust between Exygy’s team and the CBAs that use Historypin. This trust with end-users continues to serve us and the client as we continue throughout the engagement.

This work was complimented with  a UX audit, design research, and technical discovery done by our design and engineering team before and after the in-person workshops. The research phase of the project culminated in research report presented to the Historypin team.

Equipped with the key findings and insights from the research report, our team began the design and ideation phase. We quickly drafted wireframes that could be iterated upon. Our ideation relies on the goals laid out through the research report which is why the initial design research phase is crucial to the success of the project. Thoughtful and strategic design research lays the foundation on which the rest of the engagement rests.

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Our collaboration with Historypin is on-going, but the research phase to date has been crucial to creating a new site for Historypin that is both accessible and inclusive, empowering CBAs and individuals to preserve and share their stories. Exygy will continue to refine and prioritize features, ensuring Historypin evolves as a trusted platform for community-driven storytelling. This starts with a site that serves the needs of everyone involved. period.