Process

Multi-methodology research helped us better understand how people feel about social media and specific interests. Initially, open-ended interviews allowed us to find out the current problems college students often face. Then, with the focus on social media experience, my team and I conducted several semi-structured interviews and contextual inquiries to better understand the users hardships and needs.

Open-ended interview: This helped us to explore different problems that students face everyday. We eventually narrowed down on designing a solution for a better social media experience.

Semi-structured interview: Once defining the problem areas, we wanted to confirm that the issue persists with our users. A semi-structured interview was a great way to gather detailed feedback and responses on their experience. We aimed to discover the current problems and hardships in addition to positive or surprising experiences.

Contextual inquiry: Following the semi-structured interviews, we thought it was necessary to do some contextual inquiries to consequently witness their behaviors while using HelloTalk. Therefore, we recruited several people for the study and asked them to think-aloud during the process. While participants used the app, we took notes and screen recorded for reference. After they were finished, we asked them some follow-up questions for more insight on their specific actions and emotions.

Personas

Insights

Affinity Diagram

To start out the ideation phase, we conducted an affinity diagramming exercise to determine any emerging patterns and groupings of actions, and features around social networking applications. Based on the affinity diagrams and our previous research insights, we began to see associations around sharing information publicly and clustered them into the following four user scenarios: Message, Post, Home, Discover.

Scenarios

The following three user scenarios can be visualized in the user flow below. As this flow shows, the user can either view their messages, search people on Discover, or view their own profile.