Hidden Figures — Major Project: 5

Further research and experience prototyping

Gaps In The Group Experience

Since my last post, I have been trying to find the gaps in the support group, and see how I could potentially improve the member's experience. To do this I created a Google Form and sent it out to the wider Waterford Fibromyalgia & Chronic Pain Support group (WF&CPSG). There are 69 members in the Facebook group and I received 16 responses to the form. The questions I asked are as follows:

• How did the group start?
• Who set it up?
• Why was it set up?
• How many members are there?
• How do new members hear about it?
• What activities happen throughout the year?
• How often does the group meet?
• What benefits do you see from the group?
• What methods of communication are used? (Physical/Tech)
• How do you or the group use them? Examples if possible
• How often do you use them?
• Is it always group-wide or is it more person to person?
• From these methods, what are the problems?
• How could the social media aspect be better?

Findings

From the responses I received the average age range is between 46–55.

The core benefits of the group that came to the forefront were support, encouragement, advice and good old humour. The main method of communication is the Facebook group, they send messages person to person but also group-wide. In regards to the experience of the group on Facebook, no one had any thoughts on how the social media experience could be improved, even though they use it frequently. Not surprising as Facebook is a successful social media app. But there were some aspects that I picked up on;

• There is a lot of noise within Facebook groups, many people posting at the same time into a one for all funnel can cause people to miss messages in a short space of time. So if you don’t keep up to date with what is going on, it can be hard to keep track. It also creates a space where meaningful messages go unread, so someone looking for advice my not receive the proper guidance as it is jumbled up with all the other content i.e videos, memes or other content directed towards humour.
• The constant need to text can cause issues with your hands, especially if you suffer from arthritis. This was mentioned by a number of participants.
• There is a lack of emotion with text-based communication. Things can be taken out of context or the true meaning goes unnoticed. To truly communicate with someone, you need to hear someone their voice in order to gain insight into how they are feeling and empathise with that.
• It is hard to find out about the group if you don’t already know about it. If you aren’t active on social media or don’t know someone within the group the chances of becoming a member is slim, as there is little to no advertising for it.
• An effort made by one of the admins was to record video messages and post them to the group, this sounded like a promising initiative but many members felt embarrassed or did not want everyone to know what they were feeling.
• The four admins are under immense pressure to regulate all the posts and keep the group flowing due to the number of posts. It takes a lot of time to process everything and includes meaningful responses.

Even though, many recorded no problems with the group experience, there are still some underlying issues going unnoticed.

From my findings, the concept I have chosen to follow through with is the physical device whereby users can connect with each other through voice notes. I believe this could have many benefits that could aid a number of the problems I mentioned above.

Persona

Since I have chosen my desired route, I felt it best to create a persona to keep myself in check when developing my concept.

As my concept progresses I may need to create a more detailed persona and journey map the experience, but for now, this will keep me focused.

Sketching

For some early form ideation, I began to sketch out a number of different possibilities. Along with that, I started to ask myself some questions;

• what would the interface look like?
• What things are people already one to one with?
• The need for feedback, when a message is sent?

I began by sketching forms that are already out there, I soon came to the realization that these forms are quite mundane and have little human affiliation. I plan to take a more conceptual approach to the form and possibly something more intimate than the traditional smart home device that you shout at from across the room that is always listening. I like the idea of a user being able to pick it up, listen to messages and speak back into it.

I know a lot of you may be thinking,

can a phone not do this already?

You a correct, it can. But my reasoning is this, you can read a book on your phone but that doesn’t necessarily mean you do. Most people would prefer to have a book in their hand, an object that has a singular purpose. Our phones are these all-powerful devices with many interfaces, but that creates a messy environment with many distractions attached to it.

Modelling

In order to flesh out my thoughts on the form, I felt it best to get making. So I decided to buy some modelling clay.

The idea of clay modelling is quite alien to me, but I found it quite therapeutic. I have more ideas in the works but below is my first iteration.

I’m going to keep working like this and iterating. Alongside that, I am going to run a co-creation session with the four admins of the WF&CPSG, whereby I ask them to model their desired device. From this, the questions I would like to be answered are;

• What would a device you speak to look like?
• How would you use it?
• What are the needs of this device?

Experience Prototype

In order to test out my idea with the WF&CPSG, to see if its a viable option or would they even use it, I had to think of a creative way to prototype the device. This got me thinking, our existing infrastructure with messaging apps is already there, with the ability to record voice notes and send them to your contacts.

So, with the existing capabilities, I have set up individual groups on WhatsApp with each of the four admins. I have asked them to send voice notes into the individual chats and from there I send the voice notes to their desired recipient. I, in this case, am the conduit for there messages, I am the “device”. I plan to run this experience prototype over time, for as long as I possibly can. At this point, I am aiming for around three weeks. I will follow up with each of the admins separately over the course of the experiment to ask about their experience with the prototype. As part of the experiment, I have asked each of the admins to keep a diary log, which will hopefully provide some rich insights.

Next Steps

• Keep the experience prototype running
• Run co-creation session with the WF&CPSG admins
• Answer the questions on how the device works
• Build, iterate, build, iterate…
• Sketch out the device architecture