Momento
Class: Research & Development Methods
Timeline: 12 weeks
Role: UX Research & UI/UX Designer
Tools: Google Suite, InDesign, Mural, Figma
In this project, I sought to create an app leveraging current social media and messaging platforms to help friends become closer. I conducted thorough user research, including secondary research, user interviews, surveys, and probe kits, to create guiding user personas to inform my design process. I used rapid prototyping for multiple rounds of usability tests.
How can we help college students foster closer friendships with their current friends?
OVERVIEW
The overarching research topic for my class was “relationships,” and I chose the domain of friendships during college. For many, college is the next big step in their life, with multiple variables constantly changing around and within them, thus begging the questions: why are some people still good friends with their high school friends while others are not? Why do we have certain friends that we still consider friends even if we contact each other only once in a while?
Over the course of 12 weeks, I followed the human-centered design approach with clear discovery, defining, ideation, and delivering phases.
APPROACH
During my discovery phase, my research consisted of desk research, observational research, user interviews, surveys, and lastly, probe kits. I wanted to ensure I had a wide variety of research from various angles in order to better understand what close friendships looked like, how they formed, and how they were maintained.
DISCOVERY
To synthesize my findings, I affinity mapped datapoints, synthesized them, and deduced insights and opportunities. I also created user personas and mindset mapped them to gain a visual overview of the spread of my target demographic.
DEFINE
As the problem is maintaining current friendships rather than establishing new ones, I felt that it would be counter-intuitive to introduce a new platform or method rather than strengthen current ones that are used within friendships. Thus, I sketched out and tested my idea, Momento, an extension available in current messaging apps that collects images, files, and videos sent to create a curated and interactive Pinterest board. This idea stemmed from my probe kit, as it seemed participants greatly enjoyed collecting and creating photo collages of their past chat logs.
I did two iterations and tested each iteration, improving each based on the feedback grid I made from their comments.
IDEATE
For my hi-fidelity solution, after two rounds of testing, I concluded that Momento indeed functions best as an extension within social media and messaging apps, as participants in each group chat responded favorably to the core features and familiarity of the mockup in relation to the platform. In this way, the memories are truly custom to each group chat and situated within the context of the memories and history of the group chat. Below are two mockup examples on Discord and Facebook Messenger.
HI-FI SOLUTION
By allowing group chats to easily collect and view past sent images and files with the context attached, users are able to recall memories and experiences fondly, bringing back the emotions and feelings they felt at the time while also feeling the urge to create new memories than can be looked on in the future.
From this project, I learned a lot about conducting user research empathetically and effectively, as well as how to phrase questions or tasks to receive unbiased feedback. It was also generally enjoyable to read people's comments and reminiscing of their friendships, especially as I was uncovering new insights that made sense but I hadn't consciously thought about before.
If I were to redo this project, I would spend more time conducting research specifically in how current close friendships are maintained. I recognize that that is a blind spot in my research, as I spent a lot of time investigating and establishing a standard of what close friendships looked like without allotting the same time to maintaining them. I also would have liked more time to iterate in the actual UI design, as the majority of my time was devoted to researching and testing.
REFLECTION