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Pigeon: Providing shared experiences
Create a platform to support long distance friendships
DesignWorks HCD Project
User Research
In our collective research as a class, we surveyed 191 people and conducted 25 interviews with individuals about their experiences with long-distance friendships.
Using affinity mapping to distill our data, we grouped the most prevalent ideas about maintaining long-distance connections. The most significant findings were that individuals sought to connect with friends online, give/receive emotional support, and exchange updates on each other’s lives in order to maintain meaningful connections. However, what made this challenging for was different schedules among friends made it hard to find common free time to talk on the phone or via video chat.
With this information in mind, I developed a “how might we…” statement and created a user persona to narrow my focus for this project.
Problem Statement: How might we provide shared experiences through a platform for users maintain emotional connections in long distance friendships?
In The Market
In addition to user research, I looked into the existing market to see what platforms were already addressing parts of this problem statement. Not only did I look into apps that were generally used for long distance communication, but I also focused on platforms and features that lended themselves to asynchronous interactions and those which fostered emotional connections among users.
I looked into Apple iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and Instagram direct messaging to inform what successful text and voice messaging features entailed. For video features, I looked at Facetime, Zoom, Skype, Instagram stories, and Marco Polo. Talkspace and Betterhelp were helpful to look at to explore what UX features might add to emotional support.
Creating A Platform
Asynchronous Communication
From the research, a takeaway was that the user engaged in multiple mediums of communication (text, voice, video) to connect with their long distance friends, so it was important to offer flexibility for the user to communicate in different ways. Therefore all three functions were integrated into the platform, but in a way that would allow users to connect and catch up with friends regardless of whether or not they shared the same schedule.
The biggest challenge was merging the heuristics of existing text messaging platforms with voice and video messaging in an intuitive way. Because this was a lot to incorporate, it was important to keep the text, voice, and video “console” as simple as possible, so as not to overwhelm the user. So, to visually keep all three functions ever-present, they are clustered together in the same spot within each conversation. But each is clearly differentiated by icon onto separate tabs.
Emulating In-Person Experiences
The goal of integrating video messaging was to emulate an in-person experience as much as possible, but in an asynchronous way. With the challenge of scheduling, live video-calls would not be the ideal stand-in for in-person connection. Therefore, the idea for video messaging was to combine the emotional connection piece of Instagram stories or video calling with the “walkie talkie” style of traditional text messaging. This would provide a privacy element—users would be able to send personal video messages to other users or groups.
Eliminating Duplicative Apps
In thinking about why the user would choose to create an account and use this platform over other apps that offer pieces of the total experience, I considered what may lower the barrier to entry. Offering sign-in using social logins such as Google or Facebook or sign-up using email or phone number would make it easier for the user to take the initial step.
Once signed in, synchronizing contacts or connections in other apps would eliminate the need to manually add individuals onto the new platform, while still offering manual entry as an option. Essentially, the idea was to consolidate communication with long-distance friends into a single platform, making it easier to maintain friendships and foster connection via communication features.
Hindsight, Testing & Improvements
In hindsight, I could have further narrowed the focus of this platform. Trying to tackle multiple features up front did not allow me to maximize the value of each. Some next steps for testing and improving could include addressing the following:
Explore if a tablet the most frequently used device for this platform. If not, consider how this would this translate to phone or desktop.
My hypothesis is that users may want to see all messaging together in sequential order (instead of text/voice on one tab and video on another tab). User testing would be valuable to evaluate this point.
Test the video function, and look into competitor and adjacent video “walkie talkie” apps like Marco Polo to see if there are features that would improve the current video function.
Synchronizing contacts and adding other platforms would possibly result in duplicate entries of the same individual if that “friend” was using different identifiers (phone, email, username). This feature could logistically require more consideration of back-end architecture. Alternately, Pigeon could limit synchronization to either contacts or a single platform to avoid this.