UX
UI
Mobile App
iOS
Research
Usability Testing
Prototyping
Groove Maps mission is to connect fans with local live music events and communities. Partnered with another UX designer, my role was to research and discover how users prefer their chat experience. Then, design a new experience for group chat and explore the users' favorite chat features.
Research, user interview, survey, UX, UI, interaction design, usability testing
Groove Maps users enjoy using the app to purchase tickets for concerts, however, they don't take advantage of the full potential of what the app has to offer which is exploration of new bands and genres. Also, the experience users have is isolated and they don't get to interact with other users.
As a music enthusiast, I recognized the potential as music and concerts is a great way for people to get together. At that point, I was excited to see how a chat feature will affect the overall experience users have while using the app.
The goal of the initial research was to understand users' behavior, motivation, and context in order to learn what motivates them to go to concerts, explore new music, experience the group chat on a mobile app, as well as their favorite chat feature while actively chatting.
By employing this research method I was able to understand our competitors and the standard chat behaviors people are used to in todays market. The apps analyzed: Songkick, Bandsintown, Jambase, Google Allo, 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.
In order to reveal users' needs, I gathered the documented insights from the interviews on a wall based on commonalities. The below personas are based on these commonalities.
At this point, my teammate and I implemented Design Studio practice, AKA Design Charette. We drew our ideas on paper simultaneously and in a timely manner, then shared our thoughts about the drafts we created. We had 2 goals in mind:
At this point, my teammate and I implemented Design Studio practice, AKA Design Charette. We drew our ideas on paper simultaneously and in a timely manner, then shared our thoughts about the drafts we created. We had 2 goals in mind:
Will the user be able to understand what communities are all about, and also understand the filtering system?
What would be the most effective affordance to be used by the users?
Should a community foster numerous chatrooms or just be a standalone generic chatroom?
At this point, my teammate and I implemented Design Studio practice, AKA Design Charette. We drew our ideas on paper simultaneously and in a timely manner, then shared our thoughts about the drafts we created. We had 2 goals in mind:
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 journey?
What would users do in case they need to look up a detail from a past chat? Would he/she know where to look? What's the expected behavior for flagging a member?
I relied on quantitative validation of the features we prioritized by analyzing stakeholders and user interviews to find trends and overlaps. I still used qualitative judgement to inform some of our decisions particularly in respect to user interface.
The User Testing stage consisted of 3 offline rounds and 1 online survey. After each round, we went back to the drawing board in order to incorporate the data received from our users. Each round uncovered new discoveries and insights, and also validated what went well in our suggested solutions. We presented the users with mostly non-leading, open ended-questions. For specific scenarios, I did not want to affect the users decision-making process through the ways we present the scenarios. The other leading questions that we've asked our users 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.
“The general chat room is where all the chit-chat happens, while the other chat rooms are there if I want to dive deeper into subjects.”
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.
The simplicity of having one dedicated page for all filtering options is preferred by the users. This is also beneficial from the business and development standpoint since interface change is minimal.
