title_friendtime_jc

Friendtime

Reconnect friends back again! 

Team

Maya Chen, Jiexin(Jessie) Lyu, Isabella Dyc’O-Neal, Vihbor Sehgal

 

Intro

Everyone has experienced the separation of best-friends during childhood, high school, or college due to differences in life paths.

It’s easy to connect with someone, but it’s also easy to lose contact with someone. We experience being apart from our close friends throughout our whole life. According to a survey, only 25% percent of people stay in contact with their childhood friends (link). Most people lose contact with each other after many years. There are many reasons for being separated from our close friends, moving, going to college, choosing different life paths… Even though people can still check their long-distance friends’ updates through social media. However,

It is difficult to stay in close contact with friends who you don’t get to see as often due to physical distance.

But many of us still want to keep in touch with old friends, especially if we have shared special and cherishable moments with them before. According to many surveys and interviews, people said they made most of their best friends during school years (link), and a lot of them want to reconnect with friends they made when they were young. There is definitely a need for people to find a way to reconnect with their old friends.

 

Research

In order to define the problem and shape the features of the app, we firstly did general rounds of needfinding user interviews. From earlier research and our own experiences, we decided to focus our design for younger generations. such as students, recent graduates, etc. In order to get a more comprehensive understanding among our target users, each of us interviewed people of different demographics for 2 rounds.

Interview round 1

Round 1 of the interview was more exploratory. We asked the interviewee if they have close college friends who are in different locations with them, if they want to stay in contact with their old friends, and in which ways do they keep in touch.

The empathy map for one of the first interviewee was:

michael_empathy

From the interviews, we noticed that people have close friends all over their life, including the elementary school to the working company. Many interviewees didn’t feel distance has impaired their friendship even though they admitted they contacted their past friends much rarely than before. Many interviewees generally don’t proactively contact their old friends. In most cases, they contact their old friends only if there is a trigger — they have the need for talking with their friends, or they happen to visit their old friends’ locations. Surprisingly, a lot of interviewees were comfortable with their current status and the “laid-back” ways they use to maintain their friendships.

“”The real friendship will never fade away because of time or space… since both of us value each other so our friendship is long-lasting”

—  interviewee m

Interview round 2

Based on the result of the first round of interviews, we decided to conduct another round of interviews to know more about the situation: what difficulties do people have when they are contacting their old friends?  How often does the interviewee contact his/her friend? How does the interview keep track of his/her friends’ updates? What would the interviewee do to reinforce or maintain his/her friendships?

The empathy map for one of the interviewee was:

Jinqiao_empathy

From the interviews, we noticed that some people do try to connect with their friends. However, because of different locations, occupations, lifestyles, connecting with old friends becomes harder. Many interviewees kept track of their old friends’ status through social media, and they felt take it takes time and effort to maintain a friendship, especially long-distance friendship.

“Even though we live in different countries right now, I will try to know her recent life by scheduling video call with her and ask her questions…however, sometimes I feel it was just me talking and she was pretty quite because we have less common topics…” –

– interviewee J

Findings

We got so many insights from the interviews, some key takeaways were

  • Most people do want to stay in touch with their old friends
  • Most people don’t want to spend too much time on maintaining a friendship
  • Most people want to have more fun and interactive ways to stay in touch with their long-distance friends, instead of just using social media apps
  • People need common topics to feel more connected to each other’s lives
  • Past pictures with friends re-enforce cherished memories

So from the interview findings, we came up with the key question we are trying to address for this design:

What if we could reconnect long-distance friends using a mobile app?

And our design question led to several “how might we” questions that might help to solve the key user problems and needs we identified earlier:

  • How might we provide an easier way for friends to reminisce about cherished memories?
  • How might we help people prioritize long-distance friendships among their busy life schedules? 
  • How might we make long-distance friends feel like they are closer to each other?

 

Brainstorming

From the interview, we found that most people stay connected with their old friends using social media, such as Facebook, Instagram… and most people contact their friends using social media’s chatting apps like Line, Messenger, Wechat… However, many of the interviewees also feel this way of connecting with friends was very passive and they want more fun ways of contacting friends.

So how could we stay in touch with friends in a more interesting way than normal social media apps? 

We conducted a few brainstorming sessions to diverge the ideas to address those “how might we” questions. Each of us came up with 2-3 ideas, and we finally narrowed down to four ideas for the initial design and prototype. Each of the team members quickly made a low-fidelity prototype to test a feature. The four features we are testing from the brainstorming session were:

Challenge box

Friends can create a list of challenges or tasks, and finish them together with this app. Each person will finish the task separately and they will sync up on the app to share their progress.

notifications

Day-by-day photo book

Each day there will be a “mystery” prompt for the friends’ group and each person needs to take a picture of himself/herself to answer the prompt. Prompts are very daily such as “what’s your morning coffee?”

Specialized event app

Hologram resembles the Facebook events feature, where users can create, join, and share events with their friends. Users will also be able to go back to an event and see “memories” from it, including photo albums, their “squad”, activity timeline…

Notification for looking at past memories

It’s an additional feature, the notification system focuses on displaying users their old memories (photographs) with friends. The notification system analyzes user’s social activities like Instagram, FB browsing frequency to prompt users to check their memories instead of spending time looking at others’ pictures.

Usability testing & findings

Each of the team members did a usability test with a user on one of the features from the brainstorming. We got many useful comments and feedback about the design which greatly helped us to make our final design decisions. Some key findings we got from the usability testing from each prototype were:

  • Notifications for looking at past memories
    • All users said they will occasionally use the feature
    • Users all felt the feature was good and said that image is the best way to start a conversation
    • A user is worried about if the notification is popping photos he didn’t want to see
  • Day-by-day photobook
    • The user felt the app was interesting and was able to capture the idea quickly
    • The user generally didn’t have much trouble navigating through the pages but felt some wordings were confusing
    • The user was confused about the “mystery” prompt idea, and wonders about who created those prompts. After explaining the “mystery” prompt idea, the user felt the idea was interesting
  • Specialized event app
    • The user was easily able to navigate between pages and showed good intuition about tough gestures
    • The overall user flow seemed to be intuitive for the user
  • Challenge box
    • The user like the idea of doing activities together with friends remotely

After sharing our usability results with the team, we figured some key takeaways from the users:

  • People like the idea of finishing challenges together with their friends
  • People like the idea of being notified about their past memories, and have a place for them to view their pictures with friends
  • The user feels they could have a closer connection with their friends if the tasks/photo prompts/challenges/notifications are context-aware and are integrated into their daily life.

 

Design

Finally, we came to the design phase. The key things we need to address for our final design was:

How to design an app that integrates all the features we’ve tested above?

and

How to design an app that people will like to use in their everyday life? 

In order to solve the above questions, we started by thinking about high-level structures for the app. We though “day-by-day” photo book with mystery prompts could be easily combined with the challenge box idea since we could create a day-by-day mystery challenge box for the users and ask them to upload photos of the challenge. The mystery challenge box will be shared among a group of friends and we will generate photo albums for them at the end. The users will be able to see their past “boxes” as photo albums, which perfectly match the idea of “specialized events” and looking back memories. We also designed the user chatting page so people could talk through the app, as well as create a new box when they are talking. Finally, we will design a notification system that prompts today’s challenge, as well as past memories for the user to reinforce their connections with friends.

Page structure and user flow

We then created the general user-flow and the detailed page structures for the app.

User flow:

user flow friendtime

Page structure:

page structure friendtime

Brading design

The next step for us was to design the branding, as well as the overall style of the app. Then thinking about branding info, each of us finds inspiring pictures online to construct a moodboard for the app. We all like bright, vivid colors since they match the idea of connecting friends perfectly.

Some moodboard we tried:

.                 moonboard

We finally settled with the color board with yellow and orange as the theme color, together with the complementary color blue and some lighter/darker shades.

The name “Friendtime” came naturally to our mind since this is an app to spend some quality time with your friends.

As for the typefaces and fonts, we follow the standard for mobile app design and chose 16 px as the body font size. We chose “Adreena Script Demo” as the logo font because we like the smoothness and artistic style of it. We chose “Poppins” as the major typeface because it is very fun, live and cute, which matches our overall design idea. 

We designed the logo by following the idea that we are designing a mystery box for photo sharing, as well as keeping in mind our overall style and colors.

Final mockups

       

  • Splash page: we created little animations to make it more vivid and dynamic
  • Home page: we designed the challenge as polaroid card to match the idea of taking photos with friends
  • Create a new box page: users are able to customize the time span, the frequency for the mystery box
  • Past boxes page: users can see all info about the box — people, time, challenges, etc.

 

For detailed mockups please visit the Figma link.

 

About me

Hi I’m Jiexin(Jessie) Lyu, a second-year MIMS student at UC-Berkeley focusing on UX design and research. To know more about my work, please visit my portfolio.