Historypin, a project of Shift Collective, is dedicated to making historical archives accessible to the public. With a focusing on preserving and amplifying histories of underserved community, their platform is a digital space for collaborative storytelling and community engagement. To continue their important mission, however, their existing platform needed an infrastructure and usability update. Exygy is in partnership with Historypin to address significant technical and usability challenges in order to preserve the long-term success of the platform.

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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