Birgess Weston

The Library Foundation of Los Angeles provides critical support to the Los Angeles Public Library, resulting in free programs, resources, and services available to the millions of adults, children, and youth in Los Angeles. Through fundraising, advocacy, and innovative programs, the Library Foundation strengthens the Los Angeles Public Library and promotes greater awareness of its valuable resources. The Foundation is currently undergoing a major restructuring of its membership operations, branding, and website presence. SMC IxD partnered with LFLA to further investigate solutions to various areas of opportunities. Our team was assigned Donors & Retention.

How might we refresh the membership experience in order to better obtain new members while retaining old ones?

By leaning into the uncertainty of the mission of the foundation and its various programs, as stated by various stakeholders in our research, we found that reiterating the mission and its impact could make ALOUD Attendees make that connection and be swayed to make recurring contributions without the need to become a member.

We proposed several solutions, including a revamped membership tiers, merchandise opportunities, a promotional video, and a new membership table experience. Each one focused on different areas of opportunities that were discovered in our field research and interviews.

Gozo is an autonomous ride share service designed to bring families closer together through conversation, play, and shared experiences. Inside Gozo, passengers can enjoy a variety of interactive games during their ride. One of the featured experiences, Gozo Trivia, is designed to spark connection by encouraging families to build memories and share meaningful moments. To deepen engagement and reduce screen distraction, Gozo integrates emerging technologies such as AR overlay displays on the side windows of the vehicle. These displays allow passengers to participate in games and activities that are spatially and socially immersive—shifting their focus away from individual devices and toward each other. During key, exciting moments in the game, riders are offered the option to capture in-car photo memories. Safety and privacy are top priorities—no personal data or images are stored in the vehicle after the ride ends. Once the journey is complete, users can access Rewind the Ride, a feature that allows them to revisit their Gozo experience. Here, they can save photos from their ride, track their trivia performance, and see how they ranked on the leaderboard—turning every ride into a lasting memory.

In today’s fast-paced world, busy schedules and constant distractions make it harder than ever for families to connect. From our research, we found that 73% of U.S adults prioritize family time, yet families spend only 53 minutes per day; for single-parent households, that time is 5 hours less. (Sources: Pew Research Center, Research Gate, US Census Bureau) We kept this in mind when developing Gozo and Gozo Trivia.

We began the project with field research, taking a ride in a Waymo to better understand the current user journey. This firsthand experience helped us map out the storyboards of the user journey, build an empathy map, and create our personas. We chose to focus on single-parent households, which led to the development of Mia and Farah as our primary users. Guided by these personas, we conducted secondary research to support and inform our design decisions. Usability testing played a key role in helping us refine both our low-fidelity and high-fidelity wireframes, ultimately shaping the final prototype. One of the most valuable pieces of feedback we received centered on improving legibility and clarifying the visual distinction between the car's native UI and the game interface.

Inspired by current emerging technologies and journeys of users like Mia and Farah, led us to design an autonomous vehicle ride share service that guides riders into meaningful and memorable conversations through play. From creating a space to unplug from phones by storing them in a charging, UV-sanitization compartment in the center console, to allowing users to choose from multiplayer games such as Gozo Trivia. Gozo Trivia prompts players to interact with the world around them using ARCore Geospatial API by identifying landmarks as they get to point A to B. We designed trivia questions around the landmarks you see along your route. From our user testing, we saw how these questions sparked teamwork and meaningful connections.