by Al Porotesano

You may recall I was working with UncodedLB and the City of Long Beach in a ‘barn-raising’ hackathon project to build an Enterprise Resource Managment Application serving the growing Homeless population in Long Beach. The App was designed for Food Banks, Local Businesses, Law Enforcement (they called them social workers), The Long Beach Veterans Administration, The Long Beach Regional Center, Local churches and shelters. We wanted to integrate them into our app to use for their day-to-day operations. This would allow the City of Long Beach to improve incentives with local businesses and non-profit organisations serving the homeless with tax incentives, amongst a few ideas the homeless app would bring.

We were excited about the app. We were a team of 15 to 20 volunteers who were enthusiastic about the project. It was a smorgasboard of talented people in one meeting room at the Long Beach Library and we were dedicated to make it work.

For the first time in my life, I was ecstatic about it. I can use my experience and talents with the successful startups I helped launch and integrating them to their new corporate partners. I can freely express how to launch the application from a series of development, operational, and marketable viewpoints aimed at combatting the growing problem of homeless people in Downtown Long Beach.

I had some design ideas of a simple user experience for a mobile team and an admin team. Our first task was to build a user profile of a homeless person. It seemed simple enough.

Tools: Pencil

I used three layout ideas for mobile and admin users on the Pencil App:

Mobile Users

Mobile Phone

Mobile Phone

Pencil offers a mobile phone wireframe template for both Android and iOS User Interfaces. We decided to use Android because it’s easier to build at the start over iOS.

A mobile team should be able to take a photograph of the homeless person from their smartphone camera. If that homeless person has identification with them, they can swipe or scan the ID from the card (this may vary). If they don’t have identification, they can take a video or audio interview. I wanted to make the mobile interface focus on taking the profile of a homeless person with ease and safety for the mobile user. Mobile users can insert tags for categorization of their profiles.

Tablet

Tablet

Similar to the Mobile Phone app, A mobile team can use the tablet to create profiles for a homeless person. The UX is more workable given tablet screens have larger display spaces to work with over mobile phones. The function is similar, but Tablets are a bit more functional for internal operations with Food Banks controlling inventories to Shelters opening beds and cots for homeless people to spend the night.

Admin

Admin

The Admin oversees the mobile team operations of profiles. Admins work with Public Workers (Social workers, Law Enforcement, etc.) if a homeless profile holds a criminal record. It’s not publicly displayed unless required by the State of California. Sure the ‘sex offender’ is a stigmatized tag, but Megan’s Law in California requires public notification of Registered Sex Offenders.

The Admin uses our app hosted on AWS or some Platform/Inrastructure as a service hosting our app. They’re shared with Public Workers, Social Workers, and other licensed users.

Outlook

This is the profile part of the homeless app I was working on. It’s my participation, but I wasn’t chosen to do so. We had 10 other UX designers who wanted to take the interface part of the project. I had the fortunate task making the application functional using the Drupal CMS framework (assigned to us).

As of this time of writing, two months later, it’s still a work in progress.

  • Al