The feedback collected from users during the test phase were negative: the experience did not match the promise of a social network for discussion and sharing of things they were passionate about. With extensive user research and testing, my design team compiled and shared user insights to company stakeholders, using them to make informed design decisions. We worked closely with production stakeholders to prioritise features in order to gradually deliver a satisfying, passion-driven app experience.
User research
Interaction design
1 product manager
2 product designers
& more
2 months
2022
Android
iOS
The social network, only available as a mobile app, is centred on creating communities for people to share and discuss about topics they are passionate about. Users can share stories in various formats, discuss via comments, and message befriended users. The social network promised to eschew advertisements and create an internal economy based on collaborations and sponsorship.
While the primary segment was 'Gen Z' users (born in the late 1990s and later), any adult smartphone user seeking information, entertainment or connection with other people regarding a subject area can be a user of this product. The recruitment of the testers for user research is also influenced by this definition.
Testers of the app mentioned that while they did not face usability issues, the app experience was subpar. The main problem was constantly receiving content unrelated to their interests as recommendations to them.
Testers noted that this meant that the current experience did not match the company's proposition of an engaging space to discover or deep-dive into specific passions, which is a big concern.
User research
Contextual research
Journey mapping
Information architecture
User interface testing
Hi-fidelity mockups
New cross-functional processes
From the product and engineering teams, the machine learning team, and content teams, we learned about the state of affairs and discussed future plans.
Through these discussions, we identified 3 domains the team needs to work on to deliver a complete experience. In this story, most of the work done occurs under the 'personalisation' domain.
How users can express their passions and shape their online presence in the social network
How users can control the recommendations provided by the social network to match their preferences
How creators/users can increase the odds of getting their content/profiles shown to the right audience
Through discussions on technical details, we discovered that the main obstacle was the lack of user preference and content data to power recommendation capabilities. On the user experience front, my team's task was to create avenues that gather information on the passions the user is interested in, along with enabling users to provide more information on the content they are creating, while other teams focus on building the required assets.
As a part of many other ambitious ongoing projects within the company, this project aims to reinforce the company proposition of providing rich experiences centred on passions. Key interactions to achieve include connecting people to the right communities based on their common passions, introducing new passions to users, and fostering friendships on the social network.
A secondary objective was to provide user insights to other teams (such as content creation teams) to supplement their own research for their roadmap planning.
When we started the project, it was shortly before early users were invited to test the application. I planned the tasks so that the lack of real users did not block the progress of the project, while ensuring that the design decisions made (and the quality of the research findings) were not compromised.
When real users were unavailable during the 'internal access' phase, we used UserTesting to source testers that match our target user and gain insights from them. The tests from this phase were designed to provide insights on users that have never been on the app before, and were hence focused on the new user onboarding experience.
When the project entered the 'closed beta' phase, we conducted interviews with a number of early users to clear more assumptions and questions. These users had experienced with the social network for some time, and were thus able to provide more relevant feedback based on their richer understanding of the social network.
Conducting these two research projects provided us with more information on the different expectations from different groups of users, which in turn assisted us in planning both the user experience of the application and the product roadmap.
From the research, we derived findings and made decisions such as:
Most testers select more passions if it is from a pre-determined list as opposed to finding each passion they can think of through a search function.
Considering all factors, we settled on an uncategorised, pre-determined list for the first release of the passion selection screen during new user sign-up.
'Closed beta' users preferred displaying all their passions publicly on their personal profile and believe that it is necessary to foster communication.
Bucking UserTesting research outcomes, we de-prioritised privacy setting controls for display of passions on the user profile for a later release.
Reviewing all the existing flows on the mobile app, we pinpointed screens and features that were most appropriate to be updated for this passion project. The flow and user interfaces of these screens are reworked to accommodate features to enable passion selection, modification, and display.
Reviews of the design are done within the design team, and later with stakeholders to finalise the assets before software engineers start building them.
Getting to the ideal state takes time, and the 'ideal state' may no longer be so to the users that we acquire in the future. To optimise engineering resources, my team and I designed the minimal experiences required for each segment of this project, and provided direction on the required features for future user acquisition phases.
Whether it is someone who wants to curate their experience or start using the app quickly, new users can indicate the passions they want to see more of and be seen as part of their identity.
Common interests are highlighted so as to increase the odds of people initiating connections and finding a sense of community on the app.
Users are prompted to update their passions based on their past activity so as to keep their presence up-to-date to their preferences.
For the recommendation systems to work, the items for the recommendation pool need to contain meaningful metadata.
