GroupMe Concept Part II: Making People Do Things
In group messaging, a hundred percent of the members see a fraction of the content.
In work environments, you have Outlook or Google Calendar. You can schedule anything from a coffee chat to dinner and you can guarantee some success. However, the pre-professional world does not work that way. Birthday parties can get Facebook Events, dinner can get a Google Calendar invite and coffee dates can get a ritualistic oath via iMessage.
In groups, it is even more of a nightmare. Organizing 40 people for an event may require an email, a Google RSVP form, or a like on a GroupMe message. They work, but they do not work well.
GroupMe Events attempted to place itself as the event tool for organizing group activities. However, it does not deliver in some areas. Not everyone replies, people don’t know where to find the details, and people forget about the event until the day of. Obviously, this is not GroupMe’s fault. There are underlying social problems as to why people are flaky.
However, as a platform, the core problem is lack of exposure. If GroupMe Events is not taking an accurate count of who’s attending, no organizer will use it. If the event can’t effectively remind someone, a user won’t see value in it.
This design aims to fix that. How might we improve the exposure of GroupMe Events, so that an organizer will see it as an effective tool for communicating group activities?
Looking at How Other Applications Show & Condense Events
Events across several apps carry similar content and actions.
Key Insights:
- Messenger based polls try hard to make reminders as small as possible.
- Events prioritize Name, location, date, and who’s going and not who’s not going.
Making Events Easily Found and Accessible
From left to right, I explored prominent or simple entry points for events. I originally found B to be compelling, but restructuring the menu would be too heavy of a change. D was also a bit too hidden for events to be effective. So, for improving the usage of GroupMe events, A was the strongest choice.
However, this ran into problems. For some people, these events are entirely irrelevant. Forcing them to see giant event fly-ins was a bit much and preferred it appearing in the message. There only fear was missing it, if they come into the conversation after the burial.
I restored my design to having the event pop in as a message. However, to make events a bit more effective, I surfaced a fly-in after it the event is buried.
Designing the Cell for Maximizing Engagement and Consistency
Engagement — I explored several interfaces to maximize engagement without going into the detail screen. I analyzed several products to see what content was valuable, all while keeping it as compact as possible.
Dismissing (“Can I get rid of this?”) — After testing, I found that there needed to be a way to get rid of the notification. Some events require members to check their schedules prior, so a user would ultimately leave it hanging unless he/she knew to respond. As a solution, I placed a dismiss action at the top right of the fly-ins.
Social Context — In the final solution, I removed the face-pile for social context. While it did help users see who was going, it is not necessary within GroupMe. Facebook did it to introduce users to content that is also followed by strangers by using one or two strong connections. However, with a small known group of friends, its not necessary to have that social pull.
Consistency — Throughout this journey, I introduced new ways of surfacing events: (1) in a sticky header and (2) as a reminder. These were representations of the same content, and they needed to be similar. However, A made it very difficult to do so. So, I strived to create a uniform way to represent this type of content. Some changes:
- Aligned all the elements to the left
- Created a pattern of the calendar glyph in small fly-ins
- Solidified language around ‘Going’ and ‘Not Going’
Final Interaction for Event Notifications
This interaction shows how a buried event can show up within a feed. Interacting with the feed will give a temporary notification to undo the behavior. After time passes, you may find a reminder pop up at the top of your message feed instead of in-feed.
Conclusion
To make GroupMe a place to manage groups, their features need to work through the noise of group messaging. Most people don’t use GroupMe to organize meetings, share files, etc. because the experience is ephemeral — it comes and goes. Users prefer to send out emails or Facebook Events because it just feels real.
This solution begins to add something new to the GroupMe experience: reliability. This starts by showing how GroupMe Events can get every member to click going or not going. It shows demonstrates how effective it can be when collecting RSVPs and reminding its users. This way, users will begin to realize GroupMe Events is a compelling choice over its competitors.
Understanding GroupMe Visual Design
As apart of the course, I had students create UI Kits for the products they were working on. Here is the UI Kit that I generated from my analysis.
All deliverables completed in Intro to Digital Product Design are open-source. Here is the download for my Sketch, Origami, Specs, etc. project files.
What I Learned
The medium is important. When content is ephemeral, users care less about what they post. But, when its more permanent (like a Google Form), users limit what they would use it for. Its the difference between creating a Google Form for business retreat and happy hour. The former is more appropriate than the latter.
I also learned something valuable about pushing my limits for user testing and explorations. Normally, I would trust my intuition. But, now I realize that users have such an unbiased perspective about your own interactions. For explorations, I saw some students only doing 2–3 explorations when they should be doing about 8–10. Therefore, I did another exploration phase myself by doubling my art-boards just to set an an example about going for quantity. In the end, my final design came from those last couple of iterations.
Looking Forward
All groups survive on engagement. Not engagement as in click-throughs or likes, but engagement as in interactions with one another. Too many products focus on making group messaging better (How can we allow groups to add images, gifs, and other content types). However, there is much more untapped value in making group interactions better.
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This is also a sample case study for the project in Intro to Digital Product Design. I am in no way affiliated with GroupMe.
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I am a senior, computer science major at Cornell University. I’ve also been a Product Design Intern for BuzzFeed and Facebook’s News Feed Team. I currently teach a course called Intro to Digital Product Design which aims to teach a design thinking process through the application of Product and UX Design.
I am also the design lead for AppDev, a Cornell project team, that makes this course possible. We also build cool stuff.
