Castro Feedback Day recap!
Wowza! What a fun Castro Feedback Day! First time bringing our Castro prototype out in the sun ☀️ We got to showcase the hard work of SF Civic Tech and Full Circle Fund volunteers, demo to local community leaders and elected officials, crowdsource design from cute ballerinas, and chat with many wonderful Castro residents :)
Thank you to our community partner Bay Area Reporter and especially publisher Michael Yamashita for being out there all day with us. We were outside on Castro & Market, in front of the Soulcycle, from 11am to 4pm.
The goals of our Neighborhood Feedback Days are: 1. Spread awareness and get people excited about what we’re working on, and 2. Gather feedback from local residents on content and design.
Castro Feedback Day
Here is what our prototype looked like, with eight different types of content (Local Events, Local News, Jobs in the Neighborhood, Local Pets, Community Resources, Local Art, Local Attractions, and a Game):
Thank you to the many community leaders and residents who stopped by the event.
We did a team retro after the event to discuss what went well and what could be improved.
😊 What went well
Strong overall positive feedback from the community, both on the content we displayed and the location we selected.
The content platform we used worked flawlessly (special shoutout to our Full Circle Fund volunteers for setting it up).
No community push-back on showing ads on the back of the kiosk.
Content-wise, the most popular screens were Local Events (as usual in every SF neighborhood so far), Local Pets (especially popular in the Castro), Jobs in the Neighborhood (we did a good job with this one), Game (yay! We keep iterating on the game screen.), Local News (thanks Bay Area Reporter), and Local Attractions (shoutout to Castro icon Harry Breaux for suggesting this one; it was our first time bringing our prototype to a popular tourist destination and we understand the need better now!)
💡What could be improved
We intentionally showed each screen for only 10 seconds at a time, and we did get requests for giving passers-by the ability to slow it down. We’ve done this before and will keep experimenting.
Content-wise, our Community Resources screen needs more polish.
Setup took 1.5 hrs (it was our first time with this specific configuration and we had to do some intense troubleshooting on the spot— special shoutout to Max Lipschultz for making it all work and SF Civic Tech volunteers Francis Li and Lola Jackson for helping out). We’ll budget more time for setup + will be faster next time.
Some people wearing polarized sunglasses told us the screens were hard to read. Incorporating this into our screen market research.
Having a clearer line of sight from the prototype to the final proposal. We’re working on that too!
We got lots of questions like “can we have this in my neighborhood too?” so we’re planning our next event soon. :)
Thank you for all the support!
Special thanks to Sam Haynor for fabrication, Francis Li and Max Lipschultz who came early and stayed late for setup and take down, Rajat Patel, Rob Gormisky, Lowell Camp, Madhu Sivaramakrishnan, and Angela Cheng for the engineering behind our content platform, our wonderful local news partner Bay Area Reporter and especially Michael Yamashita who was out there all day with us, local news leaders Michael Durand, Mel Baker, Sapna Satagopan and Laura Moorhead, SF Civic Tech volunteers Nikki Collister, Lola Jackson and John Dunning, Brandon Cruz-Youll whose cats made everyone smile, and the many friends and supporters (and baby nephews) who came by to show their curiosity about what we’re building ❤️
👏 Finally, thank you to local community leaders from the Castro Community Benefit District, Castro Merchants, and Eureka Valley Neighborhood Association for welcoming us this week! Especially Masood Samereie, Jennifer Waggoner, Harry Breaux, Nate Bourg, and Andrea Aiello— what a joy to get to know you.
