
Zencity
'Create a Project' flow and case study
Zencity is an AI tool for local governments which gathers and analyzes resident generated data and then delivers actionable insights that help governments prioritize resources, track performance, and connect with their communities.
The Challenge
One of the most basic building blocks in our product is “ The Project”. Currently, project creation can only be handled by an absurd manual and managed process, creating a lot of frustration among our users.
Obviously, we want to provide our users with DIY tools to create and edit their own projects

BEFORE - the internal project-creation (not open for users)
Inspiration & Compatitors
As part of my research, I looked at Zencity's competitors (Meltwater, Sprinklr, Sprout Social, Citizenlab, and more) and found other UX solutions for creating complex queries












Usability testing summary
-
Platform users are not comfortable with defining data queries
-
Users struggled to understand the difference between “and”, “or” functions
-
Users left uncertain to whether their query provided the relevant data output
-
Users do not hit enter after inserting the keyword
-
Setting different colors for keyword types caused confusion among the users
A sneak peek of our internal usability test
Conclusion
We need to sacrifice usability for the sake of simplicity

The Solution
A simpler project creation process:

We've added the 'Use a template' option

Templates
-
We offer users a library of templates for typical discourse areas (e.g. Christmas)
-
Divided the templates into categories for easy orientation

Query page template
-
First, we freeze the query form so the user can read, wait for the items to upload, and then he can decide whether to edit the query or continue
-
The only available type of rules are: Keyword and Topic


Query page with preview
-
Undo/Redo - the user can undo/redo any step he did in the query builder
-
Previewer - show a live preview of the collected items, so the user can edit the query if needed
-
The number of items helps the user understand how wide is his search
-
few tooltips pop to guide the user through his first actions

'Meta data'
In this screen the user is asked to fill up basic fields
Full flow