Project: Accessible Park Finder
Role: Lead UX Designer
Duration: 5 weeks
Project Vision​
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The New York State public school system enrolls nearly 1.5 million K through 8th-grade kids. Around 12% of those kids are disabled, that's 280,641 children. Living in an area with many public schools, kids playing is at the center of my life. Ensuring ALL children have access to a safe location to play, no matter their ability, is the core value of Play 4 All.
Challenges
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1. Making park filters that best represent the community it is meant to help.
2. Keeping the app simple, easy to use, and engaging.
3. Focusing on designing an app that provides a detailed picture of the parks in the area.
The Start
Play 4 All is a park match-making app—because the perfect park match doesn’t just happen by chance. Our mission began with a simple goal: to make outdoor play in NYC more inclusive and accessible for children of all abilities.
To get there, we started by empathizing with the people who use parks every day—parents of disabled and able-bodied children, pet owners, casual readers, and more. Through user interviews and research, we discovered a common need: a park-finding experience that’s simple, inclusive, and intuitive.
So we began with four key questions that guided our design process...
How do we best serve our primary group of users?
What park filters are commonly left out that would better represent the disabled community?
What other apps or websites offer a similar product?
Which app features are most important to our users?
With these questions in mind, we surveyed potential users and found that users were itching for an app that was easy to use, had more filter options, and focused on helping parents find safe parks.
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In the app, users mentioned wanting these filters: open grass areas, fenced-in playgrounds, and wheelchair-accessible playgrounds. Users also wanted to have the ability to save parks they enjoyed, use their current location to search parks, and the ability to select more than one filter for parks.
Meet the Users
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Name: Joe Nahn
Age: 28
Job: Accounting
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Name: Shawn Row
Age: 32
Job: Digital Marketing
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Name: Kim Hert
Age: 44
Job: SAHM
(Stay at Home Mom)
Joe is a father of two boys, one with a hearing impairment. He worries that some of the parks are not visually engaging enough for him. He has a full-time job, so he needs a quick way to look for new parks in his area.
Shawn loves to work in the park; she is wheelchair bound but has to use the bathroom when she is out. She needs an app that can help her narrow down a park with accessible bathrooms.
Kim Hart is a stay-at-home mom of four kids: 3 girls and 1 boy. Kim's youngest is visually impaired, and she has a dog. She would love an app that showed her parks with fenced-in playgrounds and an open grass area.
Learning from the Competition
Competitive Analysis
During our initial user interviews, many participants were aware of a few existing products offering similar services. However, they also shared thoughtful critiques, pointing out gaps that inspired the direction of Play 4 All.
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The most comparable platforms included the NY State Park Service website and Playground Buddy. While both allow users to search for parks and apply basic filters, they fall short in several areas:
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Users can't select multiple filters at once
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Information is outdated or incomplete
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One is strictly web-based, the other is not NYC-specific
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Overall design and usability were described as confusing, disorganized, and not accessibility-focused
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With those insights in mind, we set out to design Play 4 All as a truly NYC-centered, inclusive, and user-friendly park-finding experience. One that is responsive, up-to-date, and built to support the diverse needs of families and individuals across the city.
Establishing the Foundation
At the start of our process, we focused on information architecture and low-fidelity paper prototypes, giving ourselves the space to rapidly sketch, brainstorm, and explore without limitations. This open-ended approach encouraged a high volume of creative solutions aimed at addressing our users’ key pain points.
Wireframes
Transitioning from paper sketches to digital wireframes brought our core user flows to life—one of the most rewarding parts of the design process. We focused on features that felt intuitive and natural for users. These wireframes and early lo-fi prototypes will be the first version tested by users, team members, and stakeholders, helping us gather valuable feedback before moving into high-fidelity design.
Iterations
One of the most essential steps in the design process is iteration. These changes come after you test your product with users and after feedback from surveys, clients, or team members. Don't worry, we didn't just iterate once on Play 4 All; it took multiple rounds to get a final product that ultimately benefited our main users, was accessible to all, and felt right.
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To know what should be iterated on, we asked our users! Through usability studies, we pinpointed participants' pain points when completing a series of prompts that mimicked what a main user flow would be. The results showed that initially, the concerns were that the map was not interactive, the pin pad was not intuitive, and the UI felt outdated. We set off to correct these in the mockups.
Bringing the Map to Life
Our low-fidelity prototype featured a map that was updated based on the zip code and filters entered. However, the map wasn't very detailed, not including the map markers like labels or color coding. The map was also stationary, not allowing the user to drag the screen to see the surrounding parks outside the entered zip code. When tested, 4 out of 5 users mentioned that the addition of those features would benefit the app.
Pin Pad Update
The original pin pad design was missing several key features: it lacked a back button, had unresponsive number keys, and overall felt unintuitive and visually unengaging.
From Flat to Functional, Here is What Worked
The users polled in our usability study thought the simplicity of Play 4 All was refreshing. However, the participants mentioned it looked and felt too familiar and outdated. Problems were found in the app's logo, park markers, and color scheme. The UI is of equal importance to the UX design of the app. With the user feedback in mind, we took to iterating to product or hi-fi mockups.
We went with an engaging and simple logo that features complementary colors with a high level of recognizability.
In transitioning from lo-fi to hi-fi, we switched our park markers from location dots to stars. The stars took up less space for a cleaner look and allowed Play 4 All to be set apart from the other similar apps. In addition, we soften the colors to make the red stars stand out.
Challenge #1
Representive Park Filters
Our main focus when developing this app was ensuring that disabled children in NYC could find a safe place to play. To achieve this goal we made sure our park filters included representative ones and others that had been left out before like, fenced-in parks and open grass areas.
Challenge #2
Simple, easy to use, and engaging
One challenge we faced when creating this app was keeping it simple, user-friendly, and engaging. So we included only essential pages, clear labeling, accessible colors, and fun park markers.
Challenge #3
Detailed Park Pictures
We wanted to make sure that the parks featured had detailed maps and listed their features clearly with matching icons. You know what they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Sticker Sheet
A sticker sheet is a very useful reference sheet when building an app. It features elements that are reused during the design process, so you do not need to make the element repeatedly. It also makes it easier for team members to work all at once, having the same reference points.
Looking Back to Move Forward
We aimed to build an app that allowed disabled children and their parents to find safe parks to play at. That didn't mean everyone couldn't use Play 4 All NYC, but this group had been regularly forgotten. This was an important issue given that the New York State public school system enrolls nearly 1.5 million K through 8th-grade kids. Around 12% of those kids are disabled, that is 280,641 in 2023.
By no means was building this app a linear process, but we listened to put users to build the best app we could for our main users. I wanted to help my community play safely.
*Design-only project created to explore user experience and interface solution.