Citizen Sync Mobile App
PRODUCT DESIGN
CLIENT
Citizen Sync, Various Cities
TOOLS
Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Pop
AUDIENCE
Suburban Families & Municipal Gov't
01. CITIZEN SYNC APP v3
In 2013, I founded Citizen Sync, a startup building mobile apps for cities in Ohio. For over 4 years, I lead the entire brand & multiple re-designs of the app. The third version of the mobile app was the most well-designed of any app we built; it allowed each new city to have their app proceedurally built from a collection of assets supplied up front, including dymanic colors and transparency.
Each city would maintain their app from a CMS supplied by us so the app needed to accomodate the varying ways each city intended to use it.
02. PLANNING & RESEARCH
After years of meeting with city and community leaders and listening to feedback, we knew the majority of their content would fall into three major sections: announcements, events and content-resources. On the main landing page, each city could decide which featured items would be showcased.
Another major part of our ecosystem was local businesses. Our recurring revenue was generated by adding business listings to the app for free, and up-charging to list events or offers in the official feed. We needed a clean, effective landing page that could represent local brands while also being dense with information, events and offers.
SKILLS
User Research, Information Architecture, Product Design, Product Management
03. DESIGN & UX
I used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to create the app design. The single largest challenge was making a product design that both looked and felt modern, but could also be built from a small handful of assets: photos, primary and secondary colors etc. Each city would have a different set of photos and colors, so the design had to accomodate anything they could throw at it.
To solve this, I relied on two key features: being able to pull a color palette from an image and a clever use of transparency. This filled that app with color and photos, and still allowed enough text contrast for readability. The design was prototyped using Pop, which allowed a semi-functional version to be demo'd during sales.
Ultimately, over ten cities used our product, representing a population of over 150k individuals and an install base over 12k.
SKILLS
UI, UX, Visual Design, Prototyping, Product Management