Echo
A prototype web app designed to help people aged 60 and over in Melbourne's city centre get out of the house and back into community life: walking routes, places to eat and drink, and nearby support services, built on the City of Melbourne's open data.
Loneliness in later life is a public-health problem, and the team found that many older people who live alone want to go out but lack a reason and the confidence. University capstone, five-person team; I was the team's Business Analyst and Design Lead.
Echo offers a few low-barrier features: personalised walking routes; nearby mental-health and support services; local places to discover, such as landmarks, artworks, memorials and sculptures; food and drink venues suggested as "third places", the sociologist Ray Oldenburg's term for places outside home and work where people meet; and a dashboard of community wellbeing. Its data, including pedestrian counts, comes from the City of Melbourne's open datasets. It collects no personal information.
In 2025 the World Health Organization linked loneliness to more than 871,000 deaths a year worldwide.
Echo stayed a prototype: the team built it over three iterations in one semester, and it was not launched to the public.
What I did
In the five-person team, I was the Business Analyst and Design Lead, with no people management responsibilities, and I helped design the product.
In the first iteration, pedestrian-density data shaped walking routes; by the third, the same data also appeared as a street-level crowd map with nearby food venues.
I wrote the backlog's six epics, with INVEST user stories and Given/When/Then acceptance criteria. I wrote the first drafts, went through them with the developers and data scientists, and revised them until the team agreed.
I broke the board's to-do cards into subtasks of about two hours, sized with the developers.
I wrote two lists covering 40 banned terms, with rules for what to say instead. I specified WCAG AA contrast and an 18px minimum type size.
I drew the wireframes in Figma and made the team's product video.
What I learned
As the team's Business Analyst, I learned how to bring everyone's goals into line, and how to fit each person's tasks together into a result the whole team could accept.