[Vibhor Sehgal]

RESEARCHER. DESIGNER. DEVELOPER.

About Me

I am a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley interested in Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Vision. Previously, I was a Research Assistant at the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab, National University of Singapore (NUS) where I worked with Professor Shengdong Zhao , School of Computing and Professor Vivien Wu, School of Nursing designing and developing interactive learning applications. In the past, I have also worked with Professor Michael Bernstein and Sharad Goel at Stanford University. My research work has been published in top conferences and journals like ACM, AAAI, Springer, Elsevier, etc.

Design Manifesto

Despite being in the field of Human-Computer Interaction for more than 3 years, I feel INFO 213 helped me understand core design concepts that can be used in both Research and Industrial settings. Following are my key takeaways from this semester-long design-intensive course:

1. Friction is not so bad afterall

Friction raises negative thoughts in most designer’s minds. However, Friction allows the user to reflect on the action he/she is about to perform. A strong example of frictions increasing safety comes with a system dialog where the user must confirm a delete action. This is something that I realized in the first module of the course, where we increased friction to reduce waste. Through our designs, we wanted to make the users ask themselves “Is this the right thing to do? Is it going to harm the environment?”.

2. Users might not need what you think they might

An Empathy map will help you understand the user’s needs while you develop a deeper understanding of the persons you are designing for. Conducting interviews and summarizing user needs was one of the most challenging part, I felt a lot of my assumptions about the user were not accurate. Also, I realized Empathy Maps can also be used to test a prototype design or in activities such as role-playing to help better understand the needs of the user.

Friendtime : Rekindle Lost Friendship

Problem Statement
Can we reconnect long-distance friends using a mobile app?

Everyone has experienced the separation of best-friends during childhood, high school, or college due to differences in life paths. It is difficult to stay in close contact with friends who you don’t get to see as often due to physical distance. My three teammates (Jessie, Maya and Isabella) and I wanted to address this problem by creating an application that could re-connect and enhance long-distance friendships.

Needfinding
Target user group
The app is designed for all people who want to stay connected with their long-distance friends. The target user group will be younger generations, such as college students, recent graduates, etc.

User Interviews
We conducted two rounds of user interviews to gain further insight into this problem. Each of us interviewed one person per round. The interviewees had very diverse backgrounds and gave us a lot of insights into shaping the app features and themes. The key findings we got from the user interview were:

  • Users need to do fun activities with close friends to make the friendship more complete
  • Users need a convenient way to stay updated with each others’ lives
  • Users need common topics to feel more connected to each other’s lives
  • Past pictures with friends re-enforce cherished memories
friendtime

 

Empathy Maps

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

Based on our HMW, we brainstormed many ideas such as past event reminders, visualize memory between friends, mystery box for shared challenges, day-by-day photo books, etc. We finally narrowed down our ideas to four to prototype:

  1. Day-by-day photobook
  2. Challenge box
  3. Specialized event app
  4. Notification for looking at past memories
Low-fi Prototyping
Notification for looking at past memories

Prototyped as an additional feature, the notification system focuses on displaying users their old memories (photographs) with friends. Often users complain that they don’t have time to catch up with old friends, this notification system analyzes user’s social activity like Instagram, Facebook browsing frequency to prompt users to check their memories instead of spending time looking at others’ pictures.

Specialized Events Application

Hologram resembles the Facebook events feature, where users can create, join, and share events with their friends. On Hologram, users will also be able to go back to an event and see “memories” from it, which include photo albums, their “squad”, and even a timeline of what they did. Ultimately, users can use Hologram to connect with people they met at that event without having to go through the often laborious task of manual search.

Day-by-day photobook

Create on-going shared memories photobook between long-distance friends by asking them to take a “shared” picture every day. The photo will be based on a prompt. Users need to collaborate in both taking and editing phases to finish the photo for the day. The prompt will be based on different categories, users can also create their own prompts and contribute to the poll

Challenge box

Challenger is an application where friends can create an activity list together that they agree to complete in a certain time span. Once one of the friends completes a task, the other friend gets a notification with a picture of them doing the task and prompts this friend to then complete the task. The idea behind this prototype is to allow long-distance friends still feel connected in each others lives by giving a sense of doing activities together.

Low-fi Usability Testing
Notification for looking at past memories

Usability Test

Use notifications to remind users to check some memories when the user is using applications like Gallery, Instagram for more than a few minutes. The aim is to help users prioritize the time wasted on looking at pictures of others’, instead show them their lovely memories (Prioritize)

The scenario for Usability Testing : While taking a break from your busy schedule, you plan to browse the Social Media application ‘Instagram’. Complete the following steps Unlock Phone, Open and Surf Instagram Application, Interact with the notification that pops up.

Video
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pgknBhAZkniNnjbFaaE0YMvMYLYyXSlu/view?usp=sharing

Test 1:

Cousin’s birthday, by chance, came through the pictures of a friend and called German friend so he feels this kind of notification is good. Will occasionally open this notification but not every time, wasn’t really sure. Talks about Google photos, It also does the same, uses AI to create weekly videos and search for specific photos.

Test 2:

Will use this feature occasionally, but what if someone doesn’t wants to think about someone but your application shows that image. Wouldn’t want this notification to pop up every time, Frequency matters. Feels, he doesn’t really think about the past that much but his girlfriend will love this feature.

Test 3:

Thinks It’s pretty cool, similar to managing time and balancing friends with other life events. Images are definitely one of the best ways to start conversations. Some applications show friend posts like the interviewee’s father uses Facebook just for looking at pictures of friends.

Specialized Events Application

Usability Test
Be able to navigate around the app and explore key features like the specific location events, event highlights, and event timeline. Being able to grasp how the year toggle bar at the bottom of the first screen works would be a plus. I asked one of my close friends to participate in the usability test, as his familiarity with the events and locations I used for the lo-fi prototype would show whether or not this app would be engaging to users or not. By having someone who could clearly conjure up a memory of the event test this prototype, I would be able to get feedback on whether or not the features I created were something desired when looking back on fond experiences.

Tasks:

  • Find the party that happened on November 21st
  • See who attended the party with you
  • Play around with the interface and see if there’s a feature you like!

Observations
User was able to easily navigate around the app, and displayed good intuition with touch gestures such as swiping left and right to “navigate” the photo carousel, scrolling down the event highlights view to find more memories of the night, and toggling between years on the homescreen bottom menu. User showed particular interest in the timeline feature, saying that he wished there were a couple more screens so that he could explore it further. When I asked him what he thought the app was for, he first said that it was a birthday surprise planner, which, while incorrect, showed that he had connected the screens to the actual event that happened.

Feedback
The user thought that the prototype was very intuitively structured, despite it being a low fidelity sketch. Understanding buttons and other navigational nuances was not hard for the user. There was a little confusion over the event highlights screen; he was unsure if there were more elements below the fold or not. This was most likely due to a spacing issue between screen sections. Overall the feedback was highly positive on the prototype and it seemed like the idea would sit well with other users who would have similar needs as my friend.

Day by Day Photobook

What user said (Please refer to the audio recording)

  • What does the “collaborative photo” look like? Is it a single photo or separate photos by each of the friends?
  • How do people decide the prompt for each day?
  • Is it a daily based app? Do I need to picture every day? What if I forgot to take the picture for today?
  • What does this icon(four squares) mean?
  • What does “log today” mean? You might need to unify the wording between pages
  • “Generate tasks” doesn’t make sense at all
  • “Create album” is easy to understand
  • Who creates the task for every day?

What user did

  • Log-in
  • At the home page
  • Confused about this page at the beginning
  • t’s weird to have take photo button on the photo itself.
  • Click the “four-square” icon and go the album page
  • At the album books page
  • Seems to understand the page easily
  • Click the first album
  • At the single album page
  • Understand this is the album for all the pics with these friends
  • Click back button
  • At the albums book page, click log today
  • Understand this is today’s pics to take
  • Click back button
  • At the album books page, click add
  • Seems didn’t get the idea of mystery box (mystery photo prompts for each day)
  • Seems have little trouble to create an album
User Flow
  • After sign-up/log-in, the user will enter the homepage, where the user can see all of the challenges for today from all on-going boxes.
  • On the homepage, the user can swipe up/down to switch between different challenges. If the challenge is not finished yet, the user will see the “unfinished” mark on the challenge and will not be able to see the friends’ photos. After the challenge is done, the challenge will be marked as “done” and the user will be able to see photos of his/her friends for that challenge.
  • On the homepage, the user can also add a new box, view friend list, or view past challenges. The user can also view photos history from past days for the box.
  • On the past challenge boxes page, the user will be able to see past boxes he/she has done, aligned as chronical order.
  • When entering a past box, the user can see past photos, as well as each challenge timeline.
  • On the create new box page the users will be able to choose the time span, frequency, and categories for the challenge. The app will generate challenges for the user.
  • On the friend list page, the user can chat with friends, as well as creating new boxes directly from the chat.
Hi-Fi Designs
Usability test

We conducted a usability test on our high-fi prototype to gain insight about the overall flow, usability, and usefulness of our application. How we structured this test is we first asked the user to complete several different tasks and then asked some conceptual questions. During the task-based portion, we asked the user to talk aloud through their thought process to allow us to better understand important features and possible problems.

The key takeaways from the task-based analysis were:

  • Able to complete most tasks without difficulty
  • Some design inconsistencies: navigation bar, button designs
  • Unsure of the connection between the past boxes page vs home screen
  • Distinction between mystery box and challenge was unclear

We asked the user conceptual questions for the second portion of this test to understand if our app is successful in tackling our initial problem at hand. We wanted to know if the user would want to use our app, when they would use it, who they would use it with. The questions we asked were:

  • What do you think the purpose of this app is?
  • Would you use this app?
  • When would you use it?
  • What Friends would you use this app with?
  • Would you use it for long-distance friends?

The key takeaways from this portion were:

  • The user would use this app with friends in person for a fun activity
  • The user would be more likely to use it if the tasks were more integrated into their life
Overall Lessons
  • It can be helpful to do multiple rounds of user interviews to learn what better questions to ask to gain even further insights.
  • Creating a mood board and a typography document was very helpful to create a coherent design pattern coherent with the concept and feel of our application
  • It is helpful to do both user testing and usability testing. User testing is useful to understand if the user would actually use your product and to see if it addresses the user’s original needs. Usability testing is useful to understand the intuitiveness and common interactions with your application.