Staying connected without social media — Impossible? A Case Study
Move over [insert your choice of minor affliction here]*, there’s a new epidemic in town — you might have heard of it. It’s called “FOMO.”
No Laughing Matter
The anxiety of not knowing what people are talking about, of hearing the details of an event you wish you’d attended, or the panic resulting from looking up and suddenly realizing you have no freaking clue where you are but that you’re definitely not where you wanted to be… it’s very real.
So, you ask, what is it? What is FOMO?
It’s the fear of missing out.
Our mission? To alleviate that fear (some of it, at least).
“Whether you’re a new student, a prospective, or just curious, Trendr can give you the insider perspective to any college in the United States. Learn about important issues, sports talk, and celebrity gossip (among other things) unique to the campus you’re exploring. Make friends at cool events, and find out what local favorites are for coffee, outdoor activities, and shopping. Get a feel for campus culture and the surrounding community — college can be hard, but with Trendr, fitting in is easy.”
Framing the Problem
We had four weeks to design and develop an iOS app from scratch. How? By following the Design Thinking cycle.
EMPATHIZE & DEFINE
Because we weren’t exactly sure where to start, we asked questions. A lot of questions.
- Who are social media users?
- Why (or why not) do people use social media?
- How do people find out about popular conversation topics?
- How do people find out where to go or what to do?
- Do people have multiple social media accounts that they use on a regular basis?
- Can they find the same information across different social media platforms?
TYPES OF USERS
We assumed that the bulk of social media users are Millennials (anyone born between 1981 and 1996). We also assumed that people were somewhat concerned about getting caught unaware of any given fad (lensless glasses, planking, Tebowing… unicorn-everything, to name a few).
56% of social media users report feeling a sense of anxiety when “missing out.”
The fear of missing out is a relatively new phenomenon — with the explosive buy-in of “friending,” “liking,” and saving candids — it has carved a permanent space in our lives. This generation is particularly sensitive to comparing lifestyles; I, for one, was in high school by the time Facebook was overtaking MySpace. We were mostly comparing IRL (in real life). My tween sister-in-law, on the other hand, has no idea what it was like without Snapchat or Instagram. Who would have guessed someone’s vintage-filtered vacation photo could elicit so much envy? But being so “in tune” with social media comes with a cost much greater than public embarrassment: Millennial spending habits, while fueling a rapidly-growing experience economy, have also been shown to be a unique obstacle to achieving long-term financial stability.
Our next step was to either challenge or validate our assumptions, so I generated a brief survey with Google Forms. However, we didn’t want to limit our scope to only Millennials, so we made sure to ask the age of all responders. It was really important that we also find out what they tended to use social media for.
PAIN POINTS
We’ve all heard people complain about social media, #amirite? Too polluted with ads, cyber-creeps, information overload, etc. We wanted to know what motivated people to not use Facebook or Twitter 24/7.
- Not that useful
- Disconnected from meaningful socialization
- Annoying to manage more than one account
- Negative psychological side-effects (i.e. “ghost vibrations”)
What I found particularly interesting was this one response:
“You have to subscribe to so many different places to reach different audiences.”
I mean, whoa. This challenged us to really consider who, then, was our audience, and what we really wanted to accomplish with this app.
To help us identify with the audience, we used the data to craft a persona. Enter Randy Marsh. He’s really intelligent and friendly, so it’s not like he doesn’t get invited to outings — he’s just really freaking overwhelmed. We kept his goals in mind throughout the design process.
POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS
Now we had to figure out what users (or Randy Marsh) would do with our app.
What if…
We made an app that would display metadata from major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter? It would categorize the main topics of interest. Say “adios” to asking about the weather. No more wading through obnoxious ads just to get to the discussion.
What if…
We showed this information as a heat map of geotagged posts, indicating the probability of a horde of people, and employed the real-time navigational power of Google or Apple Maps to either direct a user toward or away from the area of concentrated activity? The user could then decide if he or she wanted to go check it out or bypass potential crowd-based congestion.
What if…
To increase the utility of our app, we considered how it might look to posit it as a marketing tool for small business owners and entrepreneurs. Combing social media for the purpose of bringing one’s business to the right place, right time, every time. To design from this angle, we looked at social media marketing and how a business might make use of “FOMO.”
“Start-up culture … is defining business in the 21st century.”
In the Middle of It
IDEATION
Some of our early designs had multiple pages, but we didn’t want users to navigate too far away from the map. I imagined a scenario where Randy Marsh was in a rush to meet up with friends or was using our app for a quick study break — in either case, we shouldn’t force him to go on a social media scavenger hunt. After all, why complicate a simple app with extraneous screens? This prompted us to consider how it might look if we put all the content in a drawer.
A concern that arose was having a cluttered interface.
We briefly dipped into data visualization and the anatomy of an infographic, as well as how to adapt these for mobile. Without going too deep, we needed to find a balance of eye-catching and meaningful.
And then there was the trouble with the navigation— namely if we could “skip” having a main tab bar, and where the search field would live after a user had searched for a college or surrounding area. We worried that it would only confuse users if the search bar stayed at the top of the drawer, mistakingly leading them to believe they could search for anything, rather than only colleges.
Challenges
Spoiler Alert! We were early in the design stage when we learned from our iOS developers that APIs (Application Programming Interface) for Facebook and Instagram were off-limits. That put a damper on the kind of data we could display in our app.
It seemed that we were momentarily at a loss with what direction to take, but we managed to pivot slightly more in the direction of location-based locations and events based on popularity (determined by reviews, social media mentions, etc.).
PROTOTYPE
I am really good at making hotspots in Sketch. No joke. I’m so happy I had the opportunity to practice this over and over, to confirm the flow of screens and not leave anything out. This was something I did throughout the design stage because it was important to me that we maintained a working prototype that accommodated the changes we made. Though not perfect, it was a convenient method for showing the developers what we had.
What follows is the InVision prototype my teammate Seth Wright constructed. This is the version we underwent a design review with, to which we received mostly positive feedback regarding the flow and discoverability of our app’s features. One concern people had was about the radius — specifically, why we had it. The radius visually communicated what size of area users were viewing for any given college campus.
Finishing Touches
I toyed around with many different combinations of colors and shapes to create this app icon.
Throughout the app, we had initially decided on a relatively neutral color scheme. We thought it conveyed a sense of professionalism that small business owners would appreciate. However, we felt it was important to acknowledge the public APIs we were using for this app, so we referenced the brand color schemes from Twitter, Foursquare, and Eventbrite.
We also had to tidy up the user interface. While some of our initial designs had Android-style features, we referred to the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) to clean it up significantly.
CONCLUSION
Presentation
We had the opportunity to formally present this project to friends, family, and industry professionals. I’ve shared the slides below.
TESTING
After getting over the initial hurdle of determining our users, empathizing with them, and defining their problems, we were able to spend our time in the “Ideate” and “Prototype” stages of the process. We have high hopes that Trendr will ease the burden of FOMO-sufferers by striking the balance between “joining in” and willfully “missing out.”
We’ll be testing once a functional version of the app has been built, and then you can expect to see it in the Apple Store!
Lessons Learned
- Have a backup plan…because chances are, you’re not all going to agree 100%.
Full disclosure: we pivoted two, three times. We initially operated somewhere in between the “social heat map” (not pursued as a result of not being able to get a person’s precise location, in addition to glaring privacy violations) and a locator for on-campus events. We struggled to agree as to whether or not this was a viable business problem-solution but in order to move forward within our limited time constraint, we ultimately didn’t pursue it as a result of not having enough research specific to on-campus events. So Trendr became a marketing aid for small businesses and entrepreneurs… That turned out to be just as difficult because of the limited APIs we had access to, how much data could be stored for a given time period, and why a growing business wouldn’t already have social media accounts. - Get your (arti)facts straight.
It became clear that with each of us uploading Sketch files to a shared Google Drive folder, it was going to get real messy, real fast. Luckily, I had just read “Lean UX” and appointed myself as the historian and made sure to rename or archive files we weren’t using. This saved us a lot of time just searching around, or from using the wrong version of our design. I periodically consolidated the pieces of different screens that we were keeping, in an effort to design with consistent elements, specs. This also helped when it came time to hand our high-fidelity wireframes over to the developers. - Slack is not “ALL THAT” — at least not all the time.
First of all, I’m not hating on Slack. It’s a powerful means of communication and I’m glad it’s conveniently a verb (“Oh, just Slack it to me”). But it doesn’t replace in-person, sit-down conversations. I surprised myself with how I took the lead on making sure the design and development teams were talking about the same things, clarifying what wasn’t clear, and taking on a managerial role. All the times I asked our team meet — via Slack message or in passing while on break — may have become redundant, but it was necessary for staying on the same page and on the same track. #allaboutthatconsistency.
Annnd…
That’s a wrap! Thank you for reading this case study. If you’d like to talk about it some more, I’m just a click away. Let’s meet soon.
*Probably shouldn’t joke about any afflictions, no matter how silly or mild. Seek real medical attention if you’re experiencing something unusual.
