Scenarios, Preliminary Designs & Rationale & Takeaways from In-class Design Review Session
For the past two years of college, Wendy invested so much time and effort into her academics and professional development goals. Having held down two internships for both summers of her first and sophomore years and with the future prospects of getting a return offer as an investment analyst intern at the same firm looking promising, Wendy finally feels ready to explore what else college has to offer. She had big plans for interacting more during her junior year but unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Being the ambitious girl she has always been, Wendy sees this as a challenge she could easily overcome by researching how social interactions have been modified as a result of the pandemic. It is in this research that she comes across our friending mobile application. She scans through the reviews and statistics; she instantly downloads the app. She proceeds to create an account, set up a profile, and explore groups and individual profiles. She recognizes a few people from her economics classes and clicks on their profiles to connect. Wendy also, to her shock, finds groups through her 'fun tags' of Wall Street, investment club, and stocks. After requesting to join those groups, she scrolls through galleries showing past events, hot topics and whatnot. She cannot wait to be part of this community!
New to Pomona College, freshman Caitlyn hopes to meet many students and potential close friends. She is living on campus but because of restrictions placed due to COVID, it is very difficult for her to meet people and attend organization events. She comes across a friending app for students to meet other students in their school and decides to download it. She sees that there are group chats with different tags to represent different interests. Caitlyn is interested in graphic design so searches groups with that tag, but there doesn't seem to be any groups related to graphic design. She goes to the create group page. She fills out the group info, adds the graphic design tag and creates it. She knows a few people at Pomona who are also interested in graphic design so she invites them to the group. She wants to learn more about recruiting in the industry so she creates an event for this Saturday in the group.
As a result of her busy schedule during her early years of college, Angela, now a Wellesley College senior, does not have deep friendships and a meaningful community at school. Angela loves music and wants to find a friend who has similar music preferences as her. Since Angela is living off campus and acknowledges that it's difficult to make friends in person, she decides to download the app Circle which helps users find friends from the same school. After setting up her profile using her school email, Angela searches through tags and the app recommends people with the same tags. Angela browses through the profiles and sends her potential friend Julie a message. Julie accepts the message, and a conversation about their favorite music and artists begin.
For our first design, we focused on individual and group profiles, prioritizing memorability and efficiency thereby creating a look similar to existing social media apps.
For our second design, we focused on the messaging aspect, and designed features such as pinning and replying to messages.
Check out our Preliminary Designs Presentation
The aspects of the prototype that worked well were users being able to find events/groups, and being able to see events. The users liked how they could use the app for seeing all events happening "on campus". Unfortunately, the users were confused about the 'pin a message' signifiers and thought they meant the person's location. The lack of signifiers to indicate that a message can be replied to also confused the users. Our prototype did not have a home page and started on the messages page so users were confused about where to find events.
First, we would change the appearance of the pin icon to be smaller and more obvious or just get rid of it. We would also add a reply-arrow like Twitter's retweet icon next to a message to signify that the user can reply to a specific message. We would also add a filter within the events page to search for events by name or by tags as suggested by a user. We would also add a feature where when joining a group event call, add an option to see your camera/mic before joining the event.
For future adjustments, we would like to focus on group functions and features rather than individual profile features to align with the app's goal of helping people find a community. Specifically, we will get rid of the browse individuals feature so the users can focus on finding a community.
For our scenario, we would focus more on finding a community rather than finding individual friends. This will be reflected in our new post-task questionnaire that asks the individual if the app supports their goals of finding, joining, and belonging in a community. Our tasks currently reflect important features we want to test so we will keep it the way it is.