UX Case Study: Squad Goals
Passion Project
Our final project for the Google UX Certificate was to create an app for the purpose of social good. This was theif rist time we could bring our own ideas to fruition with such a broad prompt. For quite some time I had the opitnion that an app could evaluate and improve social relationships and now I could apply my new knowledge from class to an extremely personal project. With the design process of research, define, ideate, design, test, and iterate, I had a clear path forward.
Hot topics
Knowing that there is always buzz about social media, documentaries on how it is affecting socitey, discussions about privacy and data exploitation, I decided to use the topic as an opportunity to get a lot of initial research with a survey that people could take anonymously. I was able to get 9 people to respond, a lot more than my previous research in my personal circles, and with a more diverse group of individuals as far as race, age, sexual orientation, and relationship status.
The survey asked about what social apps people use regularly, what features they wish social media had or what they dislike the most about their social apps. I was also able to feel out a consensus for my initial idea of a friend ranker/ evaluator and found that this would not be enough for someone to download an app. I would need to find more features that people are looking for to solve the problem of lack of human connection.
Solving wicked problems
Two personas were created to represent two different contexts as I would need to design an app and an accompanying website. There needed to be a clear use case for each. The first persona wanted to manage their social time better being a busy work from home professional. Because a lot of work was already done on their computer, it is more likely they would conveniently use a web app through their laptop or desktop computer. The second persona was a gentleman nearing retirement worrid about becoming lonely in these later stages of life. This persona would serve as a reminder that the app needs to be intuitive to be accessible by everyone - everyon ei s the target demographic because everyone as humans needs human connection.
Unique Market Value
Being more invested in this product, and still looking for new ways to solve a large and complicated problem, I did a more extensive competitive audit. During this process, I learned what a CRM was (Customer Relationship Manager) and that some of these companies were trying to brand their product as another way to manage your contacts. They seemed very cold and not engaging.
The most visually impressive competitor and the the one to actually target personal relationships as the purpose of their application was Clay. there were a few other apps that were more simple and fun, however, they had little support and limited functionality as they seemed to be mini projects created through developer boot camps. These all gave me a great starting point on what was available and what I could improve on and offer to people as something unique and fun to solve their problems related to social connections.
Ideate
I knew the main features I wanted to include were missions of making contact with friends that served as reminders with notifications and a daily mission hub. This would be in addition to the evaluation and ranking system of my initial idea. Finally, the users in my survey wanted resources for a variety of subjects, so I wanted to offer articles with tips and lists of resources related to topics of human interaction.
The main user flow of contact missions needed to be fun and intuitive to stand out from the marketplace and keep users engaged. Something so novel meant that while there wasn't a convention to need to adhere to, I would have to design something that was easy to understand, made visual sense, and yet was fun like a game. Luckily I had usability studies to help with my iterations.
The Desktop Challenge
Creating a few more landing and information pages for a website was simple and went quicly. the difficult part about this task was an app after login that functioned like a desktop application. Several screens were merged because of the massive real estate, however I had to balance having too much information on a screen that would make it too busy, and finding additional features to fill the space so a page would not feel empty and pointless.
The layout was modeled after some of the competing CRMs I had researched earlier because a few actually offered this desktop capability as well. This is where I left off the project I was able to create and connect all the same screens as the app for the main user flow, but some of the screens will need to have features designed before I can add them- a completely new ideation phase.
Next Steps
Research- I need to understand more about designing for games and gamification as well as best practices for desktop web apps.
Ideation- The next main process is an evaluation, so more ideas of how to present a questionnaire will ned to be thought out to find the best process.
Design- Besides the utility pages like notifications, user settings, evaluation settings, and user profiles that I have not completed, I also want to design an onboarding or walk-through process as this is a new app and users will need some orientation.