Project Brief
Project 3 has begun and passed in a blink of two weeks. Once we got our team groupings, we found out we had to choose an existing mobile application available in the market and work on identifying if there are problems and/or opportunities with the application.
After a little discussion between the team, we decided to go with the Snapchat mobile application. Personally, I have not used Snapchat before but I do know about the basic features that it has to offer and it’s core audience is mostly for the younger generation. I felt that it would be a good experience and also an interesting challenge to learn about an application that I would never have thought to use.
Following that, we drafted out a project plan to list our objectives and timeline to adhere to it during the project phase so as to keep ourselves paced and make sure we don’t spend too much time on dwelling on an activity.
First Impressions — Expert Review
So first up, we needed to learn all we could about Snapchat by installing the application and just playing with the features. We definitely could see a few problems with the application, namely the affordances for ease of navigation.
Next we researched a little more on Snapchat’s business model, usage statistics and any other related news on Snapchat. It gave us a good insight on Snapchat’s company, Snap, and how their business and revenue model is structured. The usage statistics also helped us in narrowing down our target audience, while we found out about competitors to Snapchat as well.
Competitive Analysis
We narrowed down to our research on three other mobile applications that are similiar in terms of functionality.
Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp Messenger and Instagram
For all the applications, we drafted out a list of tasks to be performed on each of them to test the ease of usage and navigation. This gave us an insight on the strengths and weaknesses of each application, and each application’s unique selling point.
User Research
After the research and analysis, it was time to gather our target users to interview about Snapchat. We focused on getting users who are using Snapchat actively and those who previously used but have stopped using the application.
After performing the interviews and transcribing the voice recordings, the team got together and discussed on the findings. We went ahead to use the methodology called affinity mapping in order to find out common categories based on the comments by the users.
From those categories, we focused on three that had the most comments. Firstly was on the “Stories” feature which might not an issue but are what users collectively agreed that it’s a core reason of using Snapchat, which is find out what their friends are sharing and the happenings in their lives.
Secondly was on the unfiltered/informal vibe that the chat features offer to the users, features like disappearing messages after bring read, the filters and lenses to create interesting and quirky media to share with friends.
Thirdly was the average usage time an user will spend on the application itself is about 3–5 minutes per session.
To address the three focus categories, we wanted to improve on the experience of viewing “Stories” from friends while updating the informal and fun direct messaging platform. Also to think of ways to increase the average time spent while in the application.
Use Flows
With the three focus areas, we created a task for each of the areas to work on.
- Viewing of Stories
- Personal Messaging
- Discovering new content
With each task, we worked on the core feature and added features and/or improvements to it.
Viewing of Stories
In the current implementation, chats and user stories are combined into a single page. In order to chat with friends, users have to scroll through a long list of stories which might or might not be posted by the people they want to talk to.
Based on our previous findings, we found that users who want to use Snapchat as a direct messaging platform don’t necessarily also want to see stories. As such, we decided to separate the two functions into two separate pages.
One more finding is that the users don’t really go to the discover page anymore and from our business model analysis, we discovered that most of snapchat’s business revenue derives from the sponsored content. So combining Stories and the sponsored content onto one page, where users can view stories and sponsored content, we believe it will benefit both users and the business model.
Personal Messaging
We focused on improving the personal messaging feature to enhance the user experience that snapchat will provide since very active users were using Snapchat as a messaging app.
With the current system, chats were organized in a confusing manner which did not make sense to our users, making it difficult for them to find the people they want to chat with. We introduced two ways of sorting users, ‘by chronological order’ and ‘by hot friends’ (friends with streaks and starred) with a tabbed function, making it easier for users to find exactly who they want to chat with.
Discovering new content
For this portion we decided to shift the focus of the discovery page to see stories from events happening rather than friends’ locations which users commented on it being very creepy and a perceived invasion of privacy. Also active users would occasionally activate the current function but do not use it as much because it is not presented as an important feature due to its low discover-ability, it also makes it difficult for first time users to find the feature because it is hidden behind a gesture with no indication.
Prototyping
Version 0
With the use flows drafted out, we worked on getting a paper prototype out quickly so that we could use it to do our first round of usability testing with a number of task to perform. It was a good decision as we could quickly churn out feedback about the usability of what we designed before moving on to the digitizing of our prototype. We further refined the prototype with the feedback and proceeded to digitize the prototype using Sketch.
First we defined the art style by getting a few of the key frames with the various elements up. Then we went ahead to split the key frames between the team. Once we done with our part, we compiled the frames into a master file. My afterthoughts is that the collaboration and combining portion of the prototype could have been more streamlined as we had to save and edit multiple versions of the file.
Versions 1 & 2
With the first digital prototype, we managed to find users to perform another round of usability testing with the same tasks from the first test. Which was very helpful, as it definitely helped to get feedback from the user’s perspective in which we would have not noticed as easily.
Feel free to take a look at our prototype at this link, I’d appreciate your feedback and comments~
Presenting our project
With our research and prototype done, finally we had to do up our presentation. It’s really not as easy as it sounds, to condense all our findings and our justification of our prototype to within 15 minutes. I do feel that this is an important skill to brush up on, as it prepares us for our future working experience where another person’s time is hugely valuable and they will only spare you a limited amount of time to present your thoughts and ideas.
Our presentation deck is located here if anyone is interested!
Reflections
Overall, I had a very interesting time with this project even though I had to learn about an application that I had never expected to use. I really appreciate my team members on what we’ve done and learnt together, they definitely made the experience much more fun and enjoyable along the whole journey.
On-going list of things for myself to improve on;
- Presentation skills
- Time management
- Effectively communicating my ideas and thoughts
- Focusing on the task at hand
Thanks to everyone that has read all the way to this section!
For now, onwards to project 4!~
