Case Study

TagMe

A civic reporting app that turns one photo into verifiable, mapped data. It gives young volunteers in Kathmandu a faster way to flag neglected public spaces, and a credible way to put those reports in front of the people who run the city.

Role Product Designer
Focus Research, UX, UI, System
Platform iOS & Android
Year 2022
TagMe shown on two phones: the report screen and the rewards screen.
The problem

Kathmandu produces more waste than its wards can keep track of. The people who notice a problem first, students walking the same streets every day, have no quick way to record it and no reason to keep doing it. The official channels are slow and silent: you file a complaint and never hear back.

TagMe started from a simpler bet: if reporting took one tap, and if doing it felt rewarding instead of bureaucratic, young people would map their own neighborhoods. And that data would be solid enough for the city to act on.

Constraint 01

Make reporting effortless.

Constraint 02

Make taking part worth repeating.

Constraint 03

Make the output usable in a council office.

Research

What I learned before designing

I studied how existing platforms handle citizen reporting, OpenLitterMap chief among them, and ran informal sessions with students who already organize cleanups. One pattern kept surfacing: these tools are built for the database, not for the person filling it.

  1. Recognition drives repetition. Volunteers kept contributing when their effort was visible to peers. Private impact faded fast.
  2. Manual input kills momentum. Asking people to tag waste types or enter coordinates mid-cleanup is exactly where they dropped off.
  3. Cleanups are social. Turnout and retention rose sharply when the work happened in groups chasing a shared goal.
Who it's for

Two people, one app

The organizer Mobilizes peers
Goal
Rallies classmates for weekend cleanups and wants the turnout to feel like it counted.
Friction
Loses people the moment their effort vanishes into a form with no visible payoff.
The advocate Works with the data
Goal
An environment student who takes findings to ward officials and needs them to hold up as evidence.
Friction
Gets dismissed when reports arrive as loose photos with no location and no proof.
How it works

The system, in four moves

01 One-tap reporting

A photo is the whole report. TagMe pulls location and time straight from the image, so there is nothing to fill in at the scene.

02 Coins and badges

Coins reward each report and keep the habit alive. Badges mark real contribution and give volunteers something to show for it.

03 Group leaderboards

Cleanups run as friendly competition. Teams form, ranks update live, and the social pull does the motivating.

04 A live map

Every report lands on a shared heatmap with its verification status, turning scattered photos into one readable view of the city.

From the journey to the screen

I mapped the full experience around two goals a volunteer might have: collect data, or run a cleanup. Then I compressed the core loop until reporting was almost nothing. Open the camera, confirm, done. Two taps from street to logged, and anything that slowed that down got cut.

User journey map covering the data-collection and cleanup paths.
The journey map: two user goals, and the decision points where people drop off.
Wireframes of the TagMe capture, map, profile, and rewards screens.
Wireframes built around the thumb, with capture, map, profile, and rewards on one nav.

From there the interface had one job: be readable outdoors, one-handed, mid-task. High contrast, generous touch targets, and a hierarchy that always points to the next action.

Outcomes

What it did

1,000+ Downloads
2,500+ Spots mapped
98% Reports verified

Low-friction capture and social motivation did the work. Volunteers logged thousands of verified spots, and organizers could walk into ward meetings with evidence instead of anecdotes.

What I'd carry forward

Goodwill gets someone to try a civic app once. Designing for status, fast feedback, and almost no effort is what brings them back. Repetition is the only thing that turns a reporting app into usable civic data.

If I took it further, the work would be on schemas that let a verified report trigger a municipal alert on its own, closing the loop between a citizen's photo and a city's response.

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