Client: Conversational DC
Year: 2020
Timeline: 2 weeks
Role: Service Designer| 4 Person Project
Tools Used: Figma
Context: Conversational DC is a social club that hosts immersive events in social settings where you can chat in another language over a drink. Each event focuses on one language and one rule: no one speaks English.
Challenge: We had 2 weeks to design a mobile application that would be the basis of the Conversational community online, which would help the organization expand their reach and better deliver the mission.
How might we design an app that brings people together to learn languages and meet others who have similar interests?
Final Prototype:
How We Got Here:
As we began laying out our approach, we had to keep in mind the design objectives for this project that had been laid out in our scope of work:
Based on these objectives, we had assumed that the main priority here would be the language learning piece, especially considering the heavy focus this organization had on immersing yourself in a language.
Eager to get the ball rolling, we started on our market research, with my colleague An taking the lead.
Research: We conducted market research on 26 mobile apps across 3 categories in order to determine best practices and any design conventions.
We noticed the following design conventions for event management, community centered apps, and gamification.
We then conducted market research on 5 social clubs in the DC area to determine what the best practices were around service design. The key finding here was that the “host” of the event really helped to set the atmosphere and tone.
To get a better understanding of the organization and what “good looks like”, we had a kick off call with our client to run through the design objectives and ensure we were aligned.
What We Learned…
- Surprisingly, our client de-prioritized the language learning platform piece! My team and I had all imagined that this mobile app would function similarly to a Duolingo or Rosetta Stone, but this wasn’t the case at all.
- Instead, fostering connections and that sense of community should be the priority for Convo.
- Additionally, this app should not be just an event management app like Meetup or Eventbrite.
Now that we had a clearer understanding of the client’s vision, An and I set out to attend one of Conversational DC’s events (French) to conduct our ethnographic research and user interviews.
By immersing ourselves in the event, it allowed us to capture user emotions and behaviors to identify personas and map out user journeys.
Service Design:
From our ethnographic research and user interviews, we came up with four key personas along with their current state journey maps. Each persona is characterized by 4 key attributes, which is their key differentiator. Based off our user interviews, we’ve captured their needs and wants, along with what they’re thinking and feeling.
After nailing down the personas, we wanted to map out each persona’s journey from pre-event to post-event. Although Ana, Selene and Gabriel are all very different personas, they are all attendees of the Conversational events, which means that they all go through the same tasks in the process from pre event, during event, and post event. However, what’s different is what they’re thinking and feeling during each of these tasks.
From these not so positive touchpoints, we’ve come up with user experience opportunities to solve for them. For example, Selene feels anxious about going alone during one touchpoint, so an opportunity here would be a chat feature where she could find someone to go with.
Jason’s journey map is slightly different due to the fact that he is a facilitator so he has more to do on the backend, but the concept here is similar. For example, Jason is thinking that these conversations are getting a little repetitive, so an opportunity here would be to have prompts so the conversations are diversified.
All of these user experience opportunities then fed into our design of Convo.
Ideation and Design:
We leveraged our market research findings and user experience opportunities to nail down the key features our mobile app would have.
- Community Feature where users would see other people’s profiles, join language communities, and be able to message other users
- Event Management Feature where a user could register for events and check into events via the app
- A “Digital Facilitator” feature that would augment the in person experience through ice breakers and games. This would also support the gamification objective our client wanted.
An, Jon, Tori and I took a weekend to sketch out our individual ideas, and came back together on Monday to aggregate our designs. Once we aligned on the pages, their content, and how things should flow, we each took ownership of a few pages to design in Figma.
Jon, our design lead, created a style guide for consistency which the team adhered to.
After the team finished designing in Figma, An and I attended another Conversational DC event to conduct the first round of usability tests.
Usability Testing and Iterations:
We attended the Portuguese event, and conducted usability tests on 6 participants between the ages of 27–46. Overall, we received positive feedback and users really enjoyed our Digital Facilitator feature and on-boarding process.
After revising our prototype to address the feedback received, Tori and Jon conducted a second round of usability tests, this time with third party testers (i.e. not part of Conversational DC).
After finalizing our prototype, we demoed Convo to our client, who was very pleased with our progress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm-WK06FUOE
Although he was unable to attend the demo himself, his co-founder was able to attend in person.
Reflections:
- Keeping the client in the loop is key! Although our client was very hands off, we had touchpoints where we provided him status updates around our progress. As a result, there were no surprises at the end, and both he and his cofounder were pleased with the results.
- While we were extremely proud of our work, my team and I came up with multiple features and enhancements that we would love to build out if given the time. A more robust language learning feature, the ability to translate the entire app into another language, messaging prompts, redemption programs (i.e. attend 3 events and get a free drink), and messaging prompts (e.g. similar to those found in dating apps) are all ideas that we toyed with.
- One of the business objectives for Conversational DC is monetization. While we did not design for this in our app, we did come up with various ways in which this could be accomplished. Partnerships with embassies and travel agencies, merchandise, premium features, paid events, and paid offerings (i.e. pay for tutoring by a native speaker) are all be great future considerations for profit.