You Think You Know Domeone, Then UX Happens
Have you ever felt nervous to give a presentation, to speak to some one you didn’t know or just of being in the spotlight? I know a lot of people, including myself, have felt this way. I also know people who appear to be so confident while speaking, that they own the entire room when they talk. I also know of people who have social anxiety so extreme that it interferes with their daily lives. These people, all of them, are who my team and I designed the Peptalk app for.
PepTalk is an app that is intended to be partnered with Joyable; a website that specializes in mental health and provides online therapy. It is offered to individuals and to companies as a health benefit for their employees. While Joyable offers therapy, Peptalk offers tools for individuals to use to help them learn conversational skills and boost their confidence to help them get past any social anxiety they might have. I can go on and on and get deep into the tools that Peptalk offers and how they can actually help out people with any level of difficulty in social situations, but I would like to concentrate on one specific aspect of research that my team and I conducted before this app or the features were even dreamed up.
Survey Screener. One of the very first steps we took was a survey screener. We sent out a screener onto various forms of social media and were shocked at the results. We had no idea that so many people struggled in social situations. Like I said, I can go on and on about the Peptalk app, the many research tools and design decisions we made and how this app could potentially be an amazing tool for so many people, but for me, the most eye opening part of this whole experience was what I learned about people who I thought I knew.
Our family, our friends, and classmates, were among many who responded to our screener. We were floored when we synthesized these results and found that people we knew, who seemed to love the spotlight and capture the attention of an entire room with confidence, were actually not confident. After screening, we interviewed some of them. Some might command the room now, but just a few years ago, they were the quiet shy girl in class, the guy who stood behind his crowd of friends so they wouldn’t expect him to carry the spotlight all night. Some of those interviewed told us they take medication for anxiety or depression. That woman’s smile and sweet laughter during conversation were her way of dealing with nerves that she gets because she panics that she might say the wrong thing during a conversation and be judged or ridiculed.
I admit, I have a very sarcastic sense of humor and love to crack jokes to whoever is listening, but when I am surrounded by people and someone asks me a question, I panic. I get really nervous and ramble. Maybe people think I love being in the spotlight. Or maybe it is really obvious that I’m afraid to be in the spotlight. So while I learned a heck of a lot about the UX process during this project, I learned a lot more about people.We know that UX is all about the user, but this time, they weren’t just “users”, they were people and they were telling us their secrets. We were there to listen, whether we were building and app or not.
