Rethink and redesign what constitutes an intensional conversation.

6-week sprint

My roles: interviews, personas, user flows, sitemap, wireframes, usability testing Other team members: Full Stack developers

How communication changes overtime

We started this project to dive deeper into our own experiences and frustrations towards virtual communication, which has been in Western culture for the past 100 years. We understand there are hundreds of use cases to study with virtual communication between technology mediums, the people that use them, and situations change throughout each interaction.

We choose to focus specifically on video calls, a technology that has added an interesting twist to virtual communicating, pivoting it closer to the in-person interactions that have happened the past thousands of years. 

In this 6-week sprint, we set out to define what video calls have to offer in our specific use case. We aim to conduct research, test our assumptions, and design an initial concept to use for usability testing.

Go out into the world and explore! But video call us all the time.

In lieu of a 6-week goal our team constructed of “Millennials” wanted to harness our own experiences to use as research. Focusing on trends, habits, and attitudes we have adopted as a younger generation and how we can connect it with older generations.

Divide and conquer: Users’ frustrations

Our users frustrations with video chat stem from; planning, available time, understanding of app/features, and unbalanced conversation. We divided frustrations into these focused categories: 

1. Have familiar functions to other video services.

2. All user tasks and functions happen in the app.

3. Create conversation templates to add structure to the conversation.

We asked users what video chat services they like and dislike. A dozen familiar name received praise, but Skype and Google Meet were among the highest. We also discovered that our second persona preferred using desktop which we assess and consider later in this case study.

Conducted analysis on Skype and Google Meet’s mobile and desktop app to deeper understand features.

User Scenario

The user niche we choose to focus on was a young adult, “Multi-tasking Millennials”, who moves away from their family dwelling. They and their family members want to communicate on a daily, weekly basis. Since their day-to-day in-person interactions changed, they want to find a video communication platform that works for both parties.

Goal!!!

Our goal is to make both parties feel values, informed, connected and leaving the conversation with a sense of connection. We understand that every relationship and conversation is multi-tiered and complicated but we think most conversations could benefit from more timed and prompted structure.

Personas

Generation Gap

We saw the generation gap as an opportunity to add structure to have both users meet in a happy medium to discuss goals, milestones and weekly banter.

Task testing

User task were pulled from the frustrations found while interviewing. We boiled down the process to the essentials while still basing the scheduling features off of the familiarity of other video app and calendars.

1. Person 1 downloads the Structured Conversations app from the app store and sends an email to Persona 2 from the app.

2. Persona 2 downloads Structured Conversations from Person 1’s email or the app store.

3. Schedule a video call for 15-45 minutes.

4. Pick a conversation templates to add structure to the call.

We’re not reinventing the wheel, just conversations

We realized that our four tasks should be tested in separate usability testing. We decided to focus on the third and fourth user tasks with a few assumptions.

• Interviewee agreed to a 30 minute Structured Conversation on Google Meet or Skype.

• Interviewee was emailed the 30 minute outline to review before video call.

• Interviewee was briefed that the questions in the outline were optional but we would try and stay to the outline talking time limit for similar testing results.

Emailed outline for 30 minutes

Testing wasn’t perfect, but neither are we

We choose desktop for our first prototype due to its larger screen, ease to have multiple applications open and its inherit stationary position.

Interviewers found receiving the outline before the conversation was helpful.

Most had difficulty adjusting to a structure that changes every 5 minutes.

flow of the conversation felt weird.

Using a timer and having prompts made our testers feel that they were on an interview instead of talking to a family member.

The test flowed smoother for the two testers that also tested on mobile, but they found it very difficult switching between video and the questions.

Desktop results

Reflections

Our 6-week sprint exposed factors that we couldn’t control with all the frustrations associated with video chatting. We were able to define our personas closely from the many conversations we had throughout research and testing. Our assumptions on time and structure need refinement.

Next Steps:

• Create a prototype to test the first and second user tasks.

• Work on front and back end development. 

• Work on mobile prototype in conjunction with desktop.