product design (IOS, desktop)

Incognito Group Chat: Beyond the MVP

LOOP Social is a group messenger product, dedicated to recreating the group messaging experience for college students. Loop allows you have substantial conversation (vs. casual random chats that also disappears) with your groups. Conversations happen in channels and are organized by topic, team and project. Incognito group chat is a feature that encourages users to express themselves freely in a safe and fun environment.

‍To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Loop Now Technologies, Inc.

My Role and Contribution

As a solo designer, I created the design from ideation to pixel-perfect delivery. My contributions included:
- Conducted in-depth user interviews with college students and competitive analysis in the market.
- Participated in design sprint with product managers and engineers.
- Sketched out Low-Fi wireframes.
- Created hi-fi user interface for the final delivery and conducted user testings to validate the design solutions.

Timeline

4 Weeks

My Team

One front-end engineer, one back-end engineer and one product manager

Challenge

All group chat apps utilize chat the same way — so how do we innovate?

In June 2017, we released a beta version of Loop Social, which is a group messenger product, dedicated to recreating the group messaging experience for college students. Most of group chat apps like Slack and GroupMe are built for a specific kind of communication — one line at a time, real-time conversations. This form of communication is sometimes useful (e.g. project management), but presents a significant downside when it becomes your primary way of communicating. How might we create a better and more enjoyable experience for users to chat with a group of people?

Step 1 Discover

User Research

I interviewed 20 college students, aged between 17 to 22, who uses group message everyday. We focused on the experience in one of the biggest group chat apps — Slack. The questions focused on which popular apps they tend to use and how often they use them. Here are the main takeaways: 
- 12/20 use Slack because it is easy to share documents related to academic projects and keep in touch with classmates.
- 10/20 said they only use Slack for classes.
- 8/20 don’t feel comfortable using Slack for personal conversations.
- 10/20 had trouble signing up for a group by the invitation.

Competitive Analysis

We did a comparative analysis of over 10 products that support group messaging in the market and revisited those competitors after our user research. A few apps that focused on college students. Although these apps have UIs with vibrant colors to appeal to attend their audience, they do not have much feature differentiation.

By conducting a competitive analysis, we identified some important areas that haven't been explored by existing applications on the market, and we decided to focus our design on improving those aspects.

Step 2 Define

People are affiliated with their identity at all times. How might we encourage people to speak freely in a group message app?

Many of the 20 students we interviewed said they have ample “side conversations” on other apps besides Slack. I believe this is because people may feel watched, monitored, or restricted about what they can say. They want to speak without being judged, post without being tracked, and gossip without being discovered.

How might we add random people in a group more easily?

People had trouble joining in a group after receiving a single email invitation. You cannot add someone into your group if you’re not friends, and you must know a person’s email in order to send the invitations.‍

Step 3 Develop

At the beginning of the ideation phase, we had a design sprint and brainstormed two different ideas and analyzed the pros and cons based on our user interviews and feedback. ‍

However, after touching base with our users and confirming our business goals, we decided to focus on solutions that are more feasible, and we reframed our design goal to focus on the group environment instead of single message.

Step 4 Deliver

Feature outline: create topic

Users can create new topic name and pick undercover time. For the MVP, we offer people 4 choices: 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours and 5 hours. The group creator can invite people into the group immediately after he or she creates the group.

Feature outline: start the chat

Once you are in, you will receive an introduction page about the incognito topic. The timer will start right away based on the setup. Once the time expires, everything in the incognito topic is deleted forever. We wish users would believe they are safe from judgment. If someone takes a screenshot of a photo, we notify other users who take the screenshot to reveal the identity.

Feature outline: notify you the topic info

We will notify the group if there is an incognito topic created. Users in the group can join in right away. We use unread dot notification to indicate if there is new message available in the group from the homepage. When the topic ends, we provide an error page that explains the cause of the problem and the action the user needs to take to go back to the home page.

Night Mode

Desktop and iOS visual design

Step 5 Measure success

Positive User Feedback

Our team conducted 20 in-depth face-to-face user interviews after we launched this beta version in one week.
- 14/20 said they like the incognito feature most among all the features in Loop.
- 8/20 loved the fake identities we assigned them that encourage them to speak freely.
- 15/20 would like to recommend this feature to their friends.

Reflection

What could I have done differently?

If I had more time with this project, I'd like it to provide more freedom for users to set up timer of a new incognito group. I will provide users a customized way to set up the timer whenever they want.

Working in a fast-paced, growing start-up, a lot of trade offs were necessary. To advocate for the user, I learned to be involved in user research as early as possible to make better design decisions.
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