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Dopple

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User Research

We began our process by interviewing people who fit our target demographic about communities and their experience building them. Our interviewees were within the range of 18-24 and were all college students. We then synthesized our interviews into a few key points which we used to focus our design process. Interviewees were also used to help develop personas that we would later use in other research steps. 

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Takeaways

  • We learned that users have different preferences for in person vs virtual communities

  • Some users feel barred from communities due to a lack of experience or knowledge

  • Having a designated space or platform can be helpful in creating a lasting community

  • Just because a relationship is online does not mean it is not as meaningful as an in-person one 

User Personas

Since the demographic that we were trying to target were college students, we created two user personas that had different personalities and interests based on our synthesized information from the interviews. One persona for Alice Dixon, a freshman that is double majoring in informatics and communications and the other for Thomas Choi, a junior majoring in physics. Using these, we created a journey map to see observe a typical day of someone who may use our app.

Takeaways

  • People may have interests or hobbies they feel uncomfortable sharing with people who do not share that interest

  • Some people have niche hobbies that they may struggle to find others to share it with despite looking

User Journey Map

From the Thomas Choi persona we generated, we constructed a user journey map that followed our persona subject through their day, noting specific pain points that presented opportunities for our design, such as when Thomas experiences moments of loneliness or when cravings for recognition arise. Observing these emotions, we were then able to start formulating design requirements and goals for our application.

Takeaways

  • People who work hard on a hobby may feel sad and discouraged when they have no one to share their work with 

  • Hobbies and interests can be the highlight of one’s day

Design Requirements and Goals

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Requirements

  1. Suggest communities/events for users based on their selected interests

  2. Enable direct one-on-one communication between users

  3. Help users find both communities and events, in-person and virtual

  4. Let users create their own events/communities for interests that are not listed

  5. Encourage small-scale event posts and engagement

  6. Enable users to generate share links to posts/events/communities/pages

  7. Enable communities and people to easily move interactions offline

  8. Allow users to showcase interests on their profiles

  9. Allow users to search up and join communities that they want to

  10. Allow users to easily edit their interests as they develop 

 

Goals

  1. Serve as a one-stop platform for finding/creating interest communities 

  2. Prioritize moving user interaction off of the platform 

  3. Provide users with affordances to easily move from Dopple to other apps 

Storyboards​

We each created storyboards based on our personas/user journey map to model potential user interactions with our product, this allowed us to plan out specific problems/situations we wanted our app to address. We were able to narrow down the focus of the app and started to brainstorm what features would be needed.

Takeaways​

  • Users would use our apps out of particular frustrations around community-building, such as being beginners in their hobby space or not being able to find people with similar interests.

  • Users would approach community-building in different ways, such as by creating new communities or connecting with existing ones.

Information Architecture

To plan out our design, we mapped out the structure in an information architecture diagram. This allowed us to see how features we envisioned would fit together. This was used when mapping out and connecting screens in our low fidelity prototype as kind of a guideline.

Takeaways​

  • This allowed us to plan out our user flow better and decide how to interconnect certain pages

  • We gained a better understanding of our page hierarchy/priority

Low Fidelity Prototype

Using our storyboards and other planning work we created a low fidelity prototype to give a framework for the app and roughly model a few key interactions within it, specifically the community/post creation. We used this to test out how our task flows worked before stylizing and polishing the prototype.

Takeaways​

  • Using page design similar to apps in the same design space makes the apps interface feel more familiar 

  • We decided to prioritize showing post on the homepage instead of recommending communities

Usability Testing

We had participants from outside the design space interact with our prototype to quickly evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of our low fidelity task flows to give insight into what changes needed to be made as we moved forward into the high fidelity prototype. More can be read about what our findings were in the PDF below.

Takeaways​

  • We learned that our bottom bar fit all of our test subjects pre-existing mental models 

  • Users wanted a back button as pages were difficult to navigate and too linear

  • The location of a post was hard to find after posting

Annotated Wireframes

Using the low fidelity prototype, we created a wireframe that showcased all of our pages and features that were relevant to our community building application, which helped us start our high fidelity prototype.

Takeaways​

  • Defined exactly what the primary goal of each page was so we could better design them for that purpose

  • Understood how users might interact with key features on each page

High Fidelity Prototype

Using information from our usability tests we improved on the low fidelity prototypes user flows, stylized the interface, and added more realistic filler text and images to give a sense for what the complete app would look like.

Takeaways​

  • Deciding on the color scheme and typography for the prototype gave us the opportunity to create a platform that was complete and professional

  • Working on the different design aspects made us more inclined to focus on the details and refined our skills in looking at the overall interface

Group Reflection

This project overall went quite smoothly, our group was effective in doing high quality work in the given timeframe and when one member was busy or unable to complete work in time others picked up the slack without question. We felt that most assignments were useful in refining our vision for our product and creating the prototype. However the user journey assignment did not feel particularly relevant to the design of the product, since it was constructed to be about the persona’s life before the introduction of our product; thus we had to imagine the persona’s day-to-day life that wasn’t as well-grounded in the interviews we did for the user research. We thought the user journey would be more useful if it were about a user’s journey through the product as they hope to achieve a certain outcome by performing various tasks in-app, since this will allow us to think through the user’s experience while using the app.

 

Throughout the quarter we learned various concepts including affordances and mental mapping and were able to apply them to our project. Mental mapping/models proved especially useful when prototyping our design interface, we drew on social media apps to create our hotbar and were successful in making it very familiar to users even when they had never seen our app before. Another concept we applied was providing the user with visual feedback for both success and failure states.

 

As a more complex and collaborative project, we had to get good at organization on both the documentation side as well as the prototyping side. We were able to share our knowledge of Figma to use components, overlays, scroll frames, and various interactions in our high-fidelity prototype. If we had more time we would have liked to make our prototype more complete. We focused on thoroughly prototyping primary functions but ignored some less key features like a settings page. Overall, the experience of researching the problem space and designing a solution proved to be a good technical and design learning experience for us, as well as a positive experience in collaborative teamwork.

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