Out of Earshot: a UX Case Study on Encouraging Voice Data Engagement
Prologue
The assignment: My classmates and I were tasked with constructing lean solutions to the business problem of encouraging users to engage with voice data on the Coronadiaries.io beta website. While our projects were inspired by this client’s platform, our final conceptualized prototypes are stand-alone products. The task of not only improving an existing platform, but creating an independent product was daunting, so I chose to rely on our lessons. I consistently referred back to my notes, and visual graphics, or I risked missing an important step in the design process. This need for my resources to be overtly handy, blatantly accessible, aligns with users’ needs to see their resources and have them as handy as my class notes were for me in this process. In this case study, I will outline how I came to that resolution.
1: Understanding the Problem
In the beginning, the application I am building will be used as an open-source journalism tool, in which anyone with a smartphone can record or listen to stories. The stories the user shares are in tangent with the pandemic, and years from now people will be able to listen to stories from one of the most remarkable times in modern day. UX, at its’ core, is a hybrid of understanding a business problem, while cultivating solutions for users.
Business probs: The current features do not encourage engagement with the voice data collected from the application. Users are recording, listening but not truly doing anything with the information they seize.
[The purpose of an open source journalism tool is to make information accessible to people and institutions alike for consumption.]
User probs: Why do they care about the recordings they listen to after they’re done with the two minute snippet? I found out through mind mapping.
2: Research + Synthesis
My research exists in two categories: exploring voice data, and learning users of voice data. I read articles on the Corona Diaries project, here, and on voice data development here. To learn about users, I conducted 15 interviews. Drafting my interview questions was where I stumbled the most. Initially, my project was pandemic focused, and thus so were my research questions. After testing out my questions on classmates first, I quickly realized that answers to questions such as “How are you engaging with others on social media?” produces skewed results as users are confined to their homes during the pandemic. This realization not only broadened my questions to include all major global events, but my entire mobile app concept expanded with them, because not all global events confine users to their homes.
The insights from my research produced three categories of focus: content, interactions and saving posts.
- Content: Users are posting on social media during global events, but are posting serious and informational content more frequently than personal updates. 4/15 participants feel a sense of guilt or that their personal updates aren’t as relevant as sharing information on their profiles.
- Interactions: “Liking” features as a way to save the posts for later is useless. A majority of participants found that they are unable to locate specific posts within the likes when they actually want to refer back to something.
- Saving Posts: Participants use a combination of ‘bookmarks’ and ‘like’ features to save posts they’ve enjoyed. Something that surprised me about their responses was that 11/15 responses included that the posts were not only saved for personal enjoyment, but also to post information at a more relevant time. Additionally, I asked users “How do you use the posts you’ve saved?” A key insight from this point was that while people often save posts, they just as frequently forget about the saves, or don’t even know about the bookmarking features on their most used apps.
3: Flows + Sketches
Roadblock. Creating the steps for signing in, navigating to features, and curating features were the tallest hurdles of the process. I now understood that users needed to see what they saved in order to remember to use it, but how? After receiving feedback from peers and two users on my much too vague sketches, and not elaborate enough user flows, I conceived the paper prototype that became a clickable prototype of the mobile application, Global Diaries.
4: Prototype
The main features:
- Bookmark collections: Users are able to bookmark posts for later keeping, but have to put the posts into a collection that they’ve created, likely to correspond to personal projects or specific global events.
- Memories: There is a page dedicated to a user’s past posts. This differs from the library of diary entries included in the profile page as ‘Memories’ are directly tied to a specific calendar day and global event. The user can then see a “This Day in History” database of all recordings of that specific day in history.
View the full prototype demo here:
Epilogue: Resolution + Next Steps
In the spirit of Lean UX, our class was tasked with rapid prototyping and conceptualization of a product. As an overview, my take, now named Global Diaries provides users with the ability to see what they save, because the categorization of voice data allows for further engagement of the things we forgot we collected in the first place. Going forward, there is a need for more usability testing, and more thorough processing of each step. The culmination of this first project highlighted strengths and uncovered room for improvement, both of which I am proud to have learned.
