Low-income individuals and families need an easier way to find reliable community resources because information about food assistance, housing, healthcare, education, and employment is often scattered across multiple websites. This makes finding help confusing, time-consuming, and stressful, preventing many people from accessing the services they need.
Name: Maria Lopez
Age: 22 years old
Occupation: Part-Time Cashier and Single Parent
Location: Orlando, Florida
Maria works part-time while raising her young child. She struggles to afford basic necessities and often spends hours searching for reliable information about food assistance, affordable housing, healthcare, and employment opportunities. She wants one trustworthy website that helps her quickly find the resources she qualifies for so she can better support her family.
During user testing and the AI focus group evaluation, I received valuable feedback from three different user personas representing people experiencing financial hardship. The users agreed that organizing community resources into one website would make finding assistance much easier. However, they also identified several areas for improvement. The most common concerns were that the search results were too broad, users wanted more personalized guidance, and they needed clearer information about eligibility requirements and the application process.
Based on this feedback, I refined my prototype by improving the navigation, enhancing the search functionality, expanding the "Learn More" sections, and adding an AI Resource Assistant to provide additional guidance. I also reorganized the website into clearly labeled categories and improved the overall layout to make the website easier to navigate. These updates helped create a more user-friendly experience while staying focused on helping low-income individuals and families quickly connect with reliable community resources.
This project taught me how important it is to understand the people you are designing for before creating a solution. Throughout the design thinking process, I learned how to conduct user research, organize ideas, build a prototype, gather feedback, and improve my design based on real user needs. Each stage helped me better understand the challenges faced by people experiencing poverty and showed me that even small design improvements can make a meaningful difference. I also strengthened my HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and problem-solving skills while creating a functional website prototype.
Most importantly, this experience reinforced the value of empathy in software development. Rather than focusing only on building a website, I focused on creating a solution that could genuinely help people access essential community resources more quickly and with less stress. If I continue developing this project, I would add personalized recommendations, eligibility screening, and interactive maps to make the Community Resource Hub even more helpful.
Codecraft Works Web Studio Project:
https://app.codecraftworks.com/web/CcKfdTPXULcC3FxjvcOP.
I will begin my presentation by explaining the problem I identified during the Empathize stage. Many low-income individuals and families struggle to find reliable information about food assistance, housing, healthcare, education, and employment because resources are scattered across multiple websites. This often makes finding help stressful and time-consuming.
Next, I will introduce my primary persona, Maria Lopez, a 22-year-old single parent who works part-time and needs a simple way to locate community resources. I will explain how understanding her needs helped shape the design of my prototype.
I will then demonstrate my Community Resource Hub prototype by showing the Home page, navigation menu, search bar, Food, Housing, Healthcare, Education, Jobs, Contact page, and the AI Resource Assistant. I will explain how each feature helps users quickly find the assistance they need.
Finally, I will discuss the feedback I received from my AI focus group and user testing. I will explain how I improved the navigation, enhanced the search feature, expanded the "Learn More" sections, and added the AI Resource Assistant based on user feedback. I will conclude by explaining how these changes made the prototype more useful and easier to navigate.