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In this project, I served as design lead on a team of four working for a Kloa, a small startup in Seattle. Kloa's product is a series of design interventions informed by algorithms that facilitate accurate mobile text input.
Their request was to investigate ways of reducing feelings of loneliness felt by millennials after using social media. In response, we delivered three design patterns applicable to social media that combat dark patterns while encouraging thoughtful usage.
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At the project outset, our sponsor had posed two specific questions in regards to transforming millennial and gen Z engagement on social media. To keep the project on track, we rescoped to initially only focus on millennial and gen Z experiences with social media. This problem area can be further dissected into the following:
Simplifying our research objectives in this way helped our team to maintain focus on gaining a more holistic view of user experiences with social media. We also wanted to avoid making assumptions about what could qualify as a valid solution by excluding the first question. Rather than testing an assumption to see if it failed, we wanted to start by better understanding the specific underlying causes of loneliness and other negative emotions. Moving forward, I conducted an academic literature review to establish our knowledge base for research.
In the spirit of developing empathy for users, we used a broad range of user research methods to better understand gen Z and millennials’ current and past usage of social media. More specifically, we wanted to know the pain points relating to social media and the range of emotions felt during usage sessions. From the literature review, we learned that passive versus active engagement online makes a difference in how users feel while on social media. While I assisted in conducting interviews and qualitatively coding transcripts, our researcher owned data gathering and analysis.
Several rounds of research exposed some key issues that were common across the user interviews, survey results, and diary study. Below are three high-level findings that had the greatest impact on our design process.
These new insights helped us reformulate a more concise design question that guided us through subsequent phases. To further distill our insights, our researcher and I triangulated our findings and produced a mental model.
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With a fresh design question in hand, we convened to share and discuss ideas. I led our ideation session by asking key questions related to the issues above such as “how might we do X?” e.g. “how might we encourage people to interact directly with their close friends?”. Using these questions, we generated ideas and conducted affinity diagramming to group themes. These themes developed into concepts that we explored through storyboarding.
From our eight storyboard concepts, we took the top three and further elaborated on them via prototyping in Figma. I was responsible for designing the landing page and close friend groups prototypes. Testing occurred via zoom in two separate rounds with four and three participants respectively. Testing protocol focused on the user’s understanding of the concepts shown, their ease of use, and the likelihood of adoption.
For the landing page experience, the most common feedback was that users did not understand it as a landing page and were not sure of its purpose. To emphasize this, I removed the bottom app bar and added floating action buttons at the end to nudge the user towards active engagement with their close friends.
Many participants in usability tests did not understand how friend groups were different from groups on facebook or elsewhere. To make this clear and apparent on the timeline, I put chips at the top showing the names of different groups.
Everyone was bothered by this design pattern because the nudge to stop scrolling was more like a shove. to make it more subtle, I suggested embedding the message notification in the timeline and showing a preview to entice users.
Results from the second round of testing validated the changes made to the prototypes and showed that the concepts behind them resonated with users. Usability participants have described below how they feel these design patterns would impact their social media experience.
This project gave me the opportunity to understand how to effectively manage a team and enforce high design standards while promoting a culture of openness and transparency.
With high-fidelity prototypes completed, I would ideally conduct more testing with a larger participant count like 10 or 15. I would also build out a design system for consistency and scalability before handing off designs to developers for building. Lastly, I want to explore the overall user experience when switching to other device platforms like web and tablet.
