Incremental Enhancement
Case Study
What is Tinkl?
Tinkl is a bathroom-finder app that helps users locate bathrooms in the Twin Cities and surrounding areas with the aim of helping trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming individuals find safe restrooms that they can use without fear
of harassment.
The Opportunity Space
What began as a project for Prime Academy has gone onto full development and the second iteration of the app is in the design phase! I was part of a team whose focus was to create a design for the user-end side of the interface. My goal was to have current and potential users in front of the app, take and synthesize feedback, and then sketch some solutions based on what was heard for a wireframe prototype.
The Final Solutions
It was necessary to create a context with existing iconography that people would recognize — star ratings, as the example I chose, to show that users were providing information more than just a binary “yes or no,” and even populating a list of restrooms that were trusted, showing repeat visits that resulted in
positive experiences.
Verified users are ubiquitous on many platforms, and this familiar checkmark icon is an easy way to signify that a user is a frequent community contributor, and that their contributions to the app can be taken with trust.
Verified users could upload a photo or avatar and create a small profile with a list of other restrooms they’ve visited to build that trust relationship with other users of
the app.
Ideation
The first step was to see how users are interacting with the current version of the app. We began the process with a cognitive walkthrough - a protocol that entails outlining the happy path and then determining the degree to which it was easy and made sense as a user to follow that path.
Our team also conducted a contextual evaluation to identify existing usability issues with consistency, visibility, and feedback for primary tasks.
The themes that stood out and pursued in my prototyping were that of community and user safety -- specifically, finding ways to ensure that the users that the information could be in some way verified so that future users could feel comfortable knowing that they were seeing information they
could trust.
I used recurring themes in the prototype, such as checkmarks to signify verified users and star ratings for ease of readability and understanding.
Learning & Impact
I learned quite a bit on this one, and the fun part of the interactions was the sense of fulfilling a need that points the direction to something important and necessary for anyone. In reflection, I learned how to keep a professional look and feel to a project that deals with something so personal, and when the subject is about our bodies, it can be an even greater challenge.
That said, I learned a lot about the subject material and even became enthused about the idea of helping someone that needed to find a judgement-free space to, as the app says, “pee in peace.”