Citizen

Citizen is a safety network and mobile application designed to give visibility into the emergency response systems of cities, providing crime and safety alerts, real-time incident updates, and live user-generated video streams. Citizen approached me with a business problem: Just over 1% of active users go live during an incident. Citizen wanted to explore solutions for lowering the barrier of entry and improving the overall broadcasting experience.

When talking to the Citizen users, the most frequent feedback given was, “Although I don’t go live now, I would go live in the right situations as long as it was easy, more obvious and I felt like I could actually help.” After looking further into the data, it became clear that splitting the home screen content into two sections (“Recent” and “Trending”) was diverging users. Users spent excess time switching between sections, rather than scrolling down to see relevant content.

My solution: A unified home feed compiling all the information from both sections. I also suggested integrating live broadcasts and varying contextual cards on the feed allowing the user to view the content right away, creating for a more engaging experience. The other suggestion was to introduce a dynamic map header. This would allow users to easily see their location and a visual representation of the feed’s activity.

For strategic reasons, Citizen decided not to launch these features at the time, but the work inspired them to continue pushing new product goals. As of 2019, a new Head of Design was hired and they’ve launched a redesign that incorporates these concepts.