Forward

Social meDIA mOBILE aPP

lENGTH: 3 MONTHS

ui/ux Design

a Social media APP

I designed this app from conception to High-Fidelity prototype. My main responsibilities were conducting interviews and surveys, creating personas, journey maps , empathy maps, developing paper and digital wireframes, low and high-fidelity prototypes, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, and iteration on designs.

Role

This was a conceptual mobile app project, I wanted to create for social good.

Duration

3 Months (Sep. 2021) – Ongoing personal side project

Team

Me, Myself, & I

Tools

Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator

Scope

Branding, UI/UX Design, User Research, Usability Testing

The Problem

Social media poses a problem for young teens and adults alike. Too much social media has been proven to cause mental health issues amongst many users. There needs to be a more productive and positive social media app that provides all the things we love about social media with less of the things we don’t want, such as irrelevant or inappropriate content, negativity, scammers and ect.

The goal/objective

Create a fun and modern gamified social media app that is based on positivity and personal growth. Connecting with friends and family and challenging others to complete the goals they set out for themselves.

Tools I used

Design Process

Qualitative Research

I interviewed 10 people over the phone, who are activley using social media, to better understand their likes and disklikes, and their usage of social media on a daily basis.

Some questions were:

What is your experience with social media apps?
How long have you been using social media apps?
How can the experience be made better?
Do you think the verification and registration process is easy?
What features do you like most in a social media app?
Do you think there needs to be more education within these apps to help new users understand it better?

Quantative Research

I created an online survey using Google Forms to observe any patterns of the needs and wants of users. The responses from the survey assisted us in pinpointing the core problems.

I wanted to take all the users feedback from surveys and interviews to deliver an intuitive and fun social media app geared more towards challenging yourself, your own personal growth, goals and achievements.

Gamification, the process of adding game-like elements to real-world or productive activities, is a growing market. By making a social media app fit into the lives of users, their goals , and doing so in an engaging manner, gamification promises to create unique, competition-beating experiences that deliver immense value.

Motivation is a powerful tool that makes human beings accomplish daily tasks and goals. Challenges and goals are the gamified mechanics serving as motivators for the users.
It is a daily motivator to keep challenging yourself, accomplishing your goals and essentially to keep moving “Forward” in life.

As a user you can set up challenges for yourself that translate to you completing your goals, that you set out for yourself.

Based on the user interviews and surveys, I began brainstorming some important features that we can offer in this application. We are going for a gamified social media that is based on your personal goals .

With the data collected from the interviews and surveys, I have create personas representing the ideal user of this app. Creating this persona helped me to experience what the user might be looking for, and helped me to arrive to better solutions as it gave me a more in depth look at the users needs and motivations.

Creating the persona and empathy map, helped me to define the target users thoughts, actions and needs with more clarity.

I made a visual representation of the user’s journey across main touch points to get a better idea of areas where I can improve the user experience.

Card Sorting

Card sorting was done to categorize all the features of the app under different sections which will further help to organize the overall Information Architeture.

Information Architecture

The card sorting results were further refines to fit the goals of the application. Some of the features were re-categorised to make them easier to find.

What I’ve learned

Social media apps have ALOT of features
Humans are driven by motivation, and need constant motivation to move forward in life.
Users for the most part are eager for more positive lifestyle habits and social platforms.

Overall I really enjoyed this process. There were some challenges along the way and some things I would do differently. Here are a few notes:

During my research I did an open card sort, I feel like a closed card sort would have gone a lot better
If I didn’t have time constraints I would have worked on the search feature of the design
I learned that “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it” but I would have liked to have designed the product page to be more interactive
The initial user’s interviews and usability testing was something I was nervous about facilitating myself, but now that I have I feel a lot more confident

Future

I would conduct a usability test for the product filter feature
Iterate designs for the profile pages
Add on extra features for including more media features like videos and reels.