With Groove Maps app, users enjoy discovering music concerts around them and the ability to purchase tickets to these concerts within the app.
Partnered with another UX designer, my role was to research and discover how users prefer their chat experience and design a new experience for group chat. Then, explore the users' favorite chat features.
The goal of the research was to understand user behavior, motivation, and context in order to learn what entices them to go to concerts, explore new music, experience the group chat on a mobile app, and learn what is their favorite chat feature when chatting.
We started with Mind Map to explore and widen our understanding around community and chat spaces.
By comparing and analyzing popular services, we were able to learn about chat behaviors people are used to in today's market. We looked at apps such as: Songkick, Bandsintown, Jambase, Google Hangouts, Slack, Snapchat, Whats App, Skype, Reddit, Facebook Groups, and Instagram.
The target was to gather information from users between 18-29 years old attending 6+ concerts per year, and 30-45 years old users who attend 3+ concerts per year.
We conducted 8 user interviews with people from the ages of 23 to 43 years old. We aimed to learn: How people discover concerts, how people interact in online communities, and valuable factors in chat experiences.
We gathered the documented insights collected at the interviews on a wall based on commonalities and from there, create 2 personas that matches 2 groups of users.
At this point, my teammate and I implemented Design Studio practice, (AKA Design Charette). We drew our ideas on paper simultaneously in a timely manner, then shared our thoughts about the drafts we created.
We had 2 goals in mind:
In this goal, we explored an opportunity that allows our personas to use filtering in order to get to the right music related community room. During this stage, we asked ourselves some important questions while getting the prototype ready to be tested by users. See questions below.
Will our personas be able to understand what 'communities' are all about, and figure out the filtering system?
What would be the most effective affordance preferred by our personas?
Should a community room foster numerous chatrooms or just be a standalone chatroom?
Will users understand where the chat emojis located? Once users are in a community chat room, we wanted to see which of the chat features they enjoy most.
Will users understand how to incorporate a chat feature into the chat feed such as uploading an image or send an emoji?
Incorporating a chat feature sometimes involved taking several steps. Are users ok with taking that extra journey?
What would users do in case they need to look up a past chat? Would he/she know where to look? What's the expected behavior for flagging a member?
This stage consisted of 3 offline rounds and 1 online survey. Each round uncovered new discoveries and insights, and validated what went well in our suggested solutions. We presented the users with non-leading, open ended-questions. For specific scenarios, I was cautious not to affect the users decision-making process through the ways we present the scenarios. The other leading questions that we've asked were designed to examine how they respond to such situations.
I enjoyed listening and empathizing with the users as I am always interested in understanding their thought processes while paying close attention to the underlying non-verbal communication.
“In a Community room, the general chatroom is where all the chit-chat happens, while the other chatrooms are there if I want to dive deeper into more specific subjects.”
Gil [User#4] 34 years old
Through the rounds of usability tests I noticed other UI related issues that users have hard time with. I had to address them too. See below:
I have noticed that some users had difficulty understanding the filter icon. By using both online and offline surveys, I found out that Filter icon A is the most intuitive and favorited by users.
Some users had difficulties to complete the mission when they were asked to create a chatroom. Initially, the affordance was at the bottom of the screen, a position that was found to be quite problematic. I checked some alternatives such as making it sticky or placing it at the bottom of the chatroom list.. The usability test results showed that the proposed location works great, yet I discovered that the icon of the chat bubble with the word ‘new’ right next to it is unclear. I chose to go with an existing visual communication symbol - the ‘+’ sign (a symbol used in other icons throughout the app) then ran another round of testing. This time results proved a great success! 100% of the users clearly understood what the new icon conveys.
The circle of users expand mostly through word-of-mouth, so my partner and I brainstormed in order to find the best ways to intensify this aspect. We placed the Share and Invite affordances at a top priority place, so it will be more accessible and welcoming users to use it. Through user tests we confirmed that users find it easy to be used, and the location of these affordances feels right and yet not disturb the flow.
'Flag a member' feature is an integral part of a chat experience. I wanted to see if users were able to understand how to flag a member. They were tasked with open ended questions such as “a user misbehaves in a chatroom and you've had enough of him/her. What would you do?”. I was pleased to see that all users stated the same answer; They want to report the misbehaving user to the system first, then have the choice to either mute the flagged users messages or completely remove their communications from their chat experience. We happily implemented these options, then reconfirmed with users once again that the flow works.
Validated that users not just understand but also prefer the structure hierarchy of the community pages, and enjoys the variety of genres.
Validated that users enjoy feeling connected. They want to have the option to pick their own chatroom rather than an auto-join option when hitting a community page.
Users feels right about placing the chat feature on bottom left side of the screen as they are very familiar with it from other chat platforms.
Validated that users choose to go with a dedicated page for all filtering options. This is beneficial from the business and development standpoints, as it reduces development efforts and ultimately saves time and resources.
"This is a high-end design agency level of work, absolutely fantastic!"
The stakeholders, who happened to also be engineers, could not have been happier. They enjoyed the structured process, the information revealed and then later validated about the users, and the necessary expansion of the UI.
Because of timely reasons, they decided to start with the development of the shorter solution first which is 1 chatroom for each music Community rather than several chatrooms. This way, they are able to have the new version hit the market faster. When they have more time, they plan on expanding each Community to offer multiple chatrooms, as the project results suggested.
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