GlobeChat

INTRODUCTION

GlobeChat was developed to address concerns around keeping in touch with loved ones while overseas. The project went through 2 major phases, the first being a research and exploratory phase as a team of 5, and then I served as the sole contributor to UX/UI, testing, and iterative concepts.

MAIN ROLEs/ tasks:
User Researching & Testing
Academic Research
UI Designer

TIMELINE:
May 2023 - August 2023

TEAM:
Kiara Anderson
Chance Logan
Twisha Mistry
Sathya Naarayanan
Roopal Pachporal
Minnie Zheng

Problem Space Finding

As a university student, many people go on exchange or have family living internationally. However, it’s hard to keep in touch with friends and family, especially while they’re overseas.

As a team of 6, we were tasked to propose a human-centred design solution around the concept of social communication. Within my team, we chatted about who we talked to regularly, how we talked, and what prompted us to engage in conversation. Soon we found that with many of us born overseas, were international students, and/or otherwise a young 20-something person with family and friends who were travelling. Thus, a common theme was struggles with overseas communication.

The problem: long-distance relationships often lacked genuine interaction, losing the small emotional touches due to physical separation.

EXPLORATORY INTERVIEWS

To explore more specific pain points, our team conducted an explanatory interview stage, to discover how people currently feel about the relationships they have, and what they like and dislike about current systems in place.

We also needed to understand which social media platforms are used by these individuals, how they use them and why. We interviewed 26 participants, ranging across different age, locations and relationships.

How do you chat with these people?
How do you decide when to chat?
Are there specific things you do to promote conversation with these people?
Do your friends or family live in different time zones? If so, how do you overcome this?
What lifestyle differences hinder and/or promote communication?

“When waiting for a reply, and the reply might not be until 12 hours later…the conversation does become so disjointed because of time zones and forgetfulness”
- Interview Participant Comment

“It’s hard to keep in touch, but most of the time my mum calls just to make sure I’m okay and ask what I’ve eaten that day”
- Interview Participant Comment

affinity diagramming

Collaboratively, my team and I presented our interview findings to each other, and collated our insights, and began to draw common themes and trends between the groups:

Similar themes (Blue)
Common problem/people they affect (Pink)
Walked the Wall on potential solutions (Orange sticky notes)

After collecting insights, comments, and pain points from our interviews, we found the main challenges of our participants were:

85% participants struggle with asynchronous conversations across timezones

54% use multiple social media platforms with different friends on each ones

96% experienced difficulty to communicate without a common interest or lifestyle

62% expressed deep sadness from lack of physical touch, intimacy, and expression

WHITE PAPER RESEARCH

Before we got too much further in, I conducted a quick sweep of white paper research, to save some time in our in-depth research phase. I looked into how people were communicating digitally, and what was already known in the research space.

Visuals were EVERYTHING. Video calls were necessary for intimacy, playing into a "multisensory experience."

Watson, A., Lupton, D., & Michael, M. (2020). Enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the COVID-19 crisis: The sociomaterialities of home-based Communication Technologies. Media International Australia, 178(1), 136–150.https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x20961568

“Seeing people is more human...when I see my friend eating cheese and wine, I could practically smell it through the screen”
- Academic Paper Participant Comment

This paper to drove our next questions:

How might we ensure that our users may give regular, passive updates to their loved ones on how they are?
How might we ensure that we do not sacrifice the emotional and sensory experiences of feeling close to one another?
How might we let them if it was an appropriate time to chat, whilst respecting the idea that many people struggle to respond or give updates live time?

ideation

To answer the questions above, we organised an in-person workshop to address each pain points we identified from our affinity diagram, each suggesting potential solutions.
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Some ideas we had were:

Consolidated social media platform dashboard
Home-Device Voice Assisted Social Media Summary
Random Play MMS communicaton game plug-in

Daily Conversation prompt generator
Haptic-feedback wearable device to show real time wearer's emotions
Physical Globe that lights up live tracking of your position
Joint scrapbook/social media diary

cOMPETITOR ANALYSIS

We analysed the top 3 most commonly used social media platforms that all our users reported to using, as well as BeReal and Google Maps, as they possessed many features that our users desired.

Facebook
Most favoured for big events
Said to be too busy
Most people have it muted

Instagram
Most favoured for casual communication & sharing photos
"Not for genuine conversations"
Lacks live locations or updates

Whatsapp
Lacks clear mode of availability or 'online status'
Just for calling
Favourable for video calling, as it is best for connectivity

Bereal
No real conversation
Good for seeing where someone is and how they're doing
Shows live time & location

Google Maps:
Location Sharing
Live location sharing
Lacks any form of communciation
Not meant for conversations

One of the biggest common factor among all these social medias is...

You have no way of knowing when it isto contact someone.

This was our point of difference with GlobeChat. We wanted to finda way around the guesswork of communication. It is not attempting to compete with any of these other social medias, but in conjunction with it.

initial proposals

The three most explored ideas were the following:

Globe Wall Portal

A screen to have in your home that can show where loved ones are, how their doing and when they're free.

Voice Home-Assistant

A device that gives updates and relayed summaries of messages/social media updates

Multimedia Phone Game

To encouraged conversation through prompts, low-level passive touch and communication

At this point we needed to take a step back and consider the actual user needs. What were these ideas offering?

We conclusively decided to explore Globe Wall Portal further as the strongest solution. The reason why the home-assistant device and the cross-platform multimedia game ideas were scrapped was because they didn't alleviate the any actual pain points or offer a better solution than current systems already in place.

From here, we further visioned and sketched out the idea of GlobeChat Portal.

CONcept feedbacks & setbacks

As a team, we created the initial design proposal of the GlobeChat Wall Portal. The main idea was to have a visual globe depicting your loved one's whereabouts. You could install the portal in your home on the wall, perhaps in acrylic glass as a projection, or a screen, or we even explored the idea as an idle screen for your TV.

As a team, we presented our ideas to our tutor, and these are some selected slides that were used in our presentation.

We combine two high importance ideas together, being able to see a joint social calendar/visual globe, as well as quick and immersive experience for those who need personal touch.

The idea would take seeing 'availability' one step further, and have quick access buttons of want to speak or don't want to speak. You can access it through an app and the wall portal.

During a feedback session after our team presented our GlobeChat idea to our tutor, she asked us a question that left me stumped mulling over it for the better part of a week as it was such a blaringly obvious roadblack. She asked the following:

If GlobeChat's signature 'hero' product is the wall portal that differentiates it from others in the market, but in the user's journey the app can be used as a standalone, how do we anticipate to build a userbase strong enough to be satisfied with just using the app?

This was such an important aspect we had overlooked, as I realised it created a weak bottle-neck for incoming users. If we couldn't entice users to the app, then we wouldn't even be able to get them to the wall portal. From here considering the scope and timeline I had left of the project (3 weeks), I had 2 choices:

Remove the app, and focus solely on the GlobeChat Wall Portal and redesigning it's marketability, desirability and viability
Remove the Wall Portal and focus on the app, and ideate how to implementing the novelties of the wall into the app, and strengthen the marketing stand-point and gaining a userbase for the app

In the end, I decided to focus on the app, and leave the potential for expansion to the Wall Portal as a future implication and room for growth. An app on your phone is more easily accessible than installing a propduct on the wall. It also didn't make sense to try to make the wall portal work if gaining a userbase was going to be a heavy focus for the product.

DESIGN PHASE

Card sorting & information architecture

Now to begin the process of design and building, I decided to create an Information Architecture Diagram, and make a layout of how the app was going to be built. I recruited some participants to engage in a card sort testing phase. I first sat my participants down, explained the premise, and handed them a number of sticky notes that contained important elements of the app, such as headings, and content of the app settings, on boarding, profiles, home page etc, and I got my participants to write down anything else i may have missed they’d expect in an app like GlobeChat.

The final outcome was this IA diagram, demonstrating how to navigate through the app and the design of it, showing the globe with the people around, as well as a quick onboarding flow:

low fidelity wireframing & figma usability prototyping

I was deciding between a quick user test now, or straight to Figma. I decided my users will have a better idea of what to expect and how it all looked with a propoer usability testing prototype.
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I took to designing each screen as according to a matching wireframe sketch & IA diagram point.

Now arguably one of the most difficult parts of design is developing low-fidelity wireframes, but the IA diagram helped me as a sort of jumping platform to design for. I cross referenced each screen that needed to be designed with the IA diagram, and developed the initial sketches.

user testing & feedback

Using Figma-guided prototypes, I conducted testing through phone calls, text-based interactions, and in-person observations. This multi-modal approach allowed a comprehensive collection of qualitative and quantitative feedback.

Common Feedback
Add Status Button: Was off in shape and the text didn't align very nicely, and was hard to see
Original Dashboard Movements: Felt awkward‍
‍Icons Intuitiveness: Not as clear on what each icon leads to what
‍Colour Scheme and Globe Novelty: Pleasing to the eye, on brand for overseas communication

It became obvious that what was instinctive to me wasn't intuitive to others. I returned to Figma and made new iterations considering the feedback.

major iterative changes

Removed the old way of moving around the app & requiring an onboarding tutorial.

Originally I thought it would be neat to forgo a navbar or menu, and navigate through sliding gestures, but found it wasn’t intuitive, and prolonged onboarding.

Instead, I implemented a navbar, employing usability heursitic recognition rather than recall, for clearer navgation.

Lacking Icon Labels
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Navbar was a bit narrow and looked a bit out of place, as well as the icons not beingintuitive.

The add status bar with skewed text was also not easy to see

Added text for further clarification on the buttons

Old dashboard aesthetics

I updated the overall look of the main dashboard, as I wanted to bring back some of the novelty around the "wall portal' idea, such as floating around in space.

I removed top header for a more modern and cleaner look, and also to create more white space around the globe area, giving it a more 3D aesthetic.

FINAL OUTCOME

The final outcome GlobeChat design features the main globe dashboard to see your friends and family, options to set your status, and create personalised circles, and suggested best times available for all participants to call.

Moreover, you can create automations for how often you want to hear notifications and receive a voice-assisted summary of all the notifications they received in a week, say from their best friends circles on Sunday 11am.

Finally, you could read notes or listen to voice memos of your best friends as they go about their day, so you’ll never have to worry again about wondering whether your loved ones needs you.

Please feel free to click through the gallery of the UI screens.

BRANDING GUIDELINE

FINAL REFLECTIONS & FUTURE IMPLICATIONS

In future, I hope to develop this idea further, and look at returning to the original GlobeChat Wall Portal, to see how that could be implemented.
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As a personal aspiration and a fundamental right, I would audit and analyse opportunities to introduce more accessible design options (perhaps a colour blindness friendly UI theme).

Want to get in touch? Reach out for a chat!