Palm Tree — A Case Study

Story

Since the pandemic became global in 2020, people are forced to become more digital and find ways to stay connected and safe. Video conferencing applications have been on the rise, with Zoom being the leader with its easy-to-use features. But the video conferencing applications in the market are not built for the needs of today.

Enter Palm Tree, a video conferencing app that provides the features customers need to have the best experience possible. Palm Tree puts the controls back into the user’s hands and allows them to customize their experience. Participants are more than just “attending a call,” they are contributing and prepped before they enter the call — no more awkward interactions with others when speaking as our technology will alert you when someone may want to respond.

Palm Tree is everything you need from a video app. Relax, and enjoy your chat.

The Basics

Company/team name: Shape / Build Class — Intro to Product Design

Teachers: Tanner Christensen, Head of Design at Gem & Jasmine Friedl, Director of Design at Dropbox

Time: 6 weeks

My Role: Product Designer

Other Jobs: Visual Design (UI), Ideation, User Interviews, User Testing, Market research

Project Brief

In the COVID era, many more people are doing everyday things remotely. This includes meeting with friends, family and work. Our task was to create a video communication app that fulfilled the user’s video communication needs. Currently, video communication applications on the market all serve its purpose and do an ok job of helping people through these times. But video has become the norm, and users need more than the essential functions of today’s video communication applications provide. How might we build something that can better serve their needs?

Research

While researching, we found that the best way to define our problem statement is to talk to everyday video app users and find out their thoughts about the applications they are using now and some of the frustrations they are having.

Key takeaways:

• Users are concerned about controlling their meetings and cutting down on the chaos.
• Users want easy controls that are not hard to find.
• Users find Facetime is the easiest app to use.
• Users are willing to invest in hardware to enhance their video communication experience.
• There are too many video apps to download and learn. Every ecosystem has its own.
• More education is needed.

User interview quotes

“It adds value when I can see everyone on one screen” — Jessica

“Too much chaos and disorder. So many people are playing music, and no one can hear what the other is saying” — Jackie

“I would like to have more features to control things like panel discussions, polling, trivia and message boards” — Julius

“I am tired of reminding people to put themselves on MUTE when they are not talking. Also, I would like privacy when waiting to join a discussion.” — Glenna

“Just make it work and don’t cut me off after 40 minutes” — Donald

Feature List

Once we reviewed the research and user interviews, we came up with a list of things our application should have to fulfill the user's needs.

• Simple and clear controls
• Easy to access settings
• Simple onboarding experience
• Multiple participants
• Visually displayed cleaner
• Ambient audio control
• Minimize background noise
• Emphasis on voice
• Privacy controls
• Allowing the user to control what is shown before connecting
• Access to meeting privately, so others in the waiting room cannot see
• Control over what is viewed during the call
• Chat control. Gifs, emoji, polling, saving chats, document sharing
• Connection communication
• Visual cues responses (message pops up to the talker that one individual may have something to say in response.)
• Open-ended question selector (with a skip option)

Personas

Out of the many available use cases, we decided to focus on “Fun time Katelin.”

Fun time Katelin — 32

Goals: Katelin wants to enjoy quality time with friends and family in the comfort of her own home.

Motivations and Values: Katelin doesn’t want COVID to slow her social life down, but wants to follow the rules to ensure everyone’s safety. She values her relationships with work friends, sports team friends and family members. This also allows her to connect with people she cannot regularly see since they live far away from her.

Pain Points: Katelin has so many video applications to choose from that cater to one of her many needs. She also has to think of the family and friends who may not understand certain apps and figure out the easiest one everyone can use.

Problem Statement

In today’s evolving communications landscape, customers want their video calls to be as easy as their phone calls. Users want control over their video outputs that are easily accessible, participant totals and how they are viewed, and, most importantly, privacy. How might we create an app that users can have full control and enhance their video communication experience?

MoSCoW Method

With so many features, we decided to use the MoSCoW method to prioritize the main features.

User Journey

User Flows

After working on the User Journey, we concluded that there had to be two user flows: The host user flow and the participant user flow. It was challenging to lump the video host and the participant together as they needed entirely different features and functionalities. The host needs particular tools to make sure her experience is comfortable. The participants do not need so many features as they are not controlling the call, only themselves.

Host User Flow

Participant User Flow

Challenges

The main challenge was that we had many solutions and features. We did not want to share a barebone product that did not address a lot of the user’s needs, but at the same time, we did not want to jam-pack it with so many features in fear that the user may get overwhelmed and confused. Using the MoSCoW method helped us pinpoint the elements needed for launch and what features could be built later. We stuck to the problem statement and used it as our north star.

Goal

With extensive research, we were able to expand our problem statement and added a few goals.

In today’s evolving communications landscape, customers want their video calls to be as easy as their phone calls. Users want control over their video outputs; they want them to be easily accessible, control participant totals, how participants are viewed, and, most importantly, privacy. By creating an onboarding system and a control panel, the user will have the ability to make the experience they want to have. The app will focus on privacy and puts the controls into the user’s hands. The user will be able to choose what is broadcasted, recorded and what is viewed.

How might we create an app that users can have full control and enhance their video communication experience?

Wireframes & Sketches

Whiteboard sketches:

Figma wireframes:

Mood Board

We started with a mood board for the UI components. We wanted a free-flowing design that would be different from the usual video apps. The layout is a bit unique, and we will be pulling from all of these resources. For example, the yellow image is similar to how I would like to display many video feeds on one page. The yoga image looks like an excellent way to show our initial onboarding — so many things to choose from and should make the design more accessible.

The next step was to create the branding of the app. We started by putting ourselves in the user’s shoes and thought about how we wanted the user to feel when using our app. We looked at family photos. We loved the earth tones and the way it made us feel when looking at the pictures. We started searching for green colours but ended up with a teal and orange look. It is very popular with lifestyle photographers and videographers. We added complementary colours, such as pink and purple. Our goal is to give the user a sense of calm and assurance while also having fun.

Visual Design

We played around with some of the colours from the images on our mood boards. We settled on the teal and orange as our primary colours because of how photographers colour correct their photos in a relaxed and calming way, which fit what we wanted our users to feel while using the app. We also added purple, pink and blue as secondary colours. We selected the “Poppins” font (a google font) because of its versatility and boldness. The icon set comes from Font Awesome because of its wide variety of icons.

Logo

From there, we started to work out our branding. We went back to the feeling we wanted our user to experience and thought about the COVID situation and how much we needed a vacation and sitting on a beach under a tree and sipping Pina Coladas. And it hit us. What is more relaxing than sitting on a hammock under a palm tree while sipping Pina Coladas out of a pineapple? Thus the name was born. Palm Tree; video conferencing made easy.

Final Design:

Final Design

For a closer look, click here: Final Design

What we learned

1. This project needs more time for research. All the features are great, but it is essential to get the ones that bring the most value to the customer.
2. This app does not address the problem of user’s having too many video applications on their phone. There would need to be more discussion on why a person would use our lesser-known app over something like apple’s FaceTime or Whatsapp.
3. Working independently compared to being on a team is an issue. More voices and opinions could have created a better experience. Collaboration with people (designer and non-designers) help create amazing things.

Retrospective

The biggest challenge was that we needed more voices in the room to get ideas and spread the work around evenly. Time was also an issue as this was a project built within a classroom setting. When looking back, I wish I spent more time asking for help during the ideation phase and asked for feedback when creating the features list.

What’s next

We will be re-evaluating our video conferencing app and working on the new features that we can implement. If this is an app that can make business sense, we will pitch it to a developer to build it.