Hunch/Theme
I am interested in exploring how I can build a social media app that is more simplistic than many current popular social media apps, which have an overwhelming amount of features. How can I construct a social media app that is very intuitive and barebones for any user to understand, while still providing enough flexibility for users’ diverse needs?
Interviews
For my interviewees, I have used aliases Mary and Lucia, respectively, to keep them anonymous.
Interviewee 1: Mary
Justification for Selection
Mary is an immigrant from England who is in her 30s and is a very busy mother. She works full-time while also being part of her local PTA and taking care of two kids. As someone who grew up at a time where social media was not so widespread as it is today, but is still of a recent enough generation to be on the side of the spectrum where people are very familiar with social media apps, gaining insight from someone in her generation is very valuable. Since Mary is a very busy person, I want to learn more about how she uses social media in her day to day and if she finds herself using up time just trying to use social media applications.
Interview
Introduction:
My goal from this interview is to learn about what features are important for users of social media, and what features are less relevant to users to create a more simplistic social media app that users can use efficiently. I will be asking you some questions related to your use of social media and what you typically use it for and how you perform those actions.
Background:
Get to know the person more:
- What is your occupation? What do you do?
- What does your typical day look like? Walk me through it? What do you do next?
- What social media apps do you use?
Build Rapport:
- I imagine your day is very busy, especially as a working parent. I cannot relate to this yet, so how do you organize your day?
- How do you incorporate social media into your day? How much time do you usually spend on social media?
- When you are on social media, what do you spend most of your time doing on the platforms? What do you use it for?
Evoke Stories + Explore Emotions:
- Were there any moments where a feature on a social media platform or the organization on a social media platform turned out very beneficial for you? Could you describe that moment?
- What would you say was the key aspect of that feature or organization that made it very useful for you?
- Were there any times where you had trouble doing something on or navigating a social media platform? Could you describe that moment?
- When you had trouble, what would you say was the main issue was about that feature/organization of things?
Reflection:
- When talking about this, you seemed (emotion)? Why so?
- You mentioned that you use social media for these reasons. Which of those reasons would you say are most important?
Wrap up:
Thank you for your time. I gained a lot of insight from this interview. I learned a lot about how a working parent like you uses social media and how they incorporate it into their daily life, and some of the things they like and dislike about it. My idea for my social media app is to make it very simplistic, only having features that allow users to do the most common things they do on social media much more efficiently.
Summary
Mary starts her day off working for a job recruiting company. As a job recruiter, she expectedly spends a lot of time on LinkedIn, two versions of it, in fact. One is a recruiter version paid for by her company and the other is her personal free account. LinkedIn greatly facilitates her work of looking for job candidates. By searching a candidate with the search bar and visiting their profile, she already gathers much of the information she is looking for and can easily connect and message the candidate. LinkedIn provides her a lot of flexibility, and she mentions “it can be pretty in-depth if you want it to be, but if you want a base-level, something to do quickly, it’s clean”. Mary often encounters both levels of usage complexity for her job. When she is not working, you can find Mary being active in her local PTA. She primarily uses Facebook to post the PTA’s events. As someone who likes to be connected to the community and be informed about local news and events, she finds Facebook’s event pages very useful. “We don’t get the local newspaper anymore, … that’s where you’d find out about the events”, but now local events show up in her feed, showing how social media platforms have become our virtual doorsteps for all sorts of information. Facebook allows the inclusion of various types of useful information on an event. Mary notes the platform does a great job at making links easy to find, which usually contain important resources, like a site to buy tickets for the event. For these reasons, Mary finds Facebook as a useful outlet for posting information about PTA events. In her free time, however, she also uses other social media platforms.
Mary likes to keep up with her family members and friends from across the Atlantic. She uses Instagram to view posts from her loved ones, but does not post much herself. She found Instagram very convenient for these reasons. When she does post, it is very straightforward, as she can accomplish this by just selecting a few buttons. Even in her free time, she keeps herself busy with DIY projects and crafts. To find inspiration, Mary uses Pinterest, which she notes has gotten much cleaner than before. She thinks it is great how you can start searching for ideas the moment you open the app. When browsing the search results, she thinks the embedded videos are a nice touch, saving her some time from having to read through an article first to see if it is relevant. After reaching the end of an article, Pinterest provides recommended articles which are related to the current one, which has been very useful to Mary. She depends a lot on Pinterest for inspiration, using it to make/find decorations for her daughter’s birthday party. Returning back to Facebook, I was very shocked when she mentioned that she used the “Marketplace” page. I never used that page and had forgotten that it existed, but Mary says her son uses it to search for old video games that he then asks her to buy, so she does visit it to perform transactions.
Interviewee 2: Lucia
Justification for Selection
Lucia is an immigrant from Peru who is in her 50s and has three children who attend college/university. Her occupation is housewife, and she spends most of the day caring for her home. Being from a generation that is generally not so familiar with social media and that does not speak English as their native language, I was curious to learn more about her use of social media and how she navigates it. Compared to Mary, since Lucia generally has a bit more free time and therefore more time to spend on social media (for personal use), I wanted to learn what features she found essential on those platforms.
Interview
(Roughly same introduction for Interviewee 1, translated into Spanish)
Introducción:
Mi meta de esta entrevista es aprender sobre qué características son importantes para los usuarios, y qué características son menos relevantes para los usuarios para crear una red social más simplista que los usuarios puedan usar más eficientemente. Le preguntare sobre cómo usa las redes sociales normalmente, y cómo hace algunas acciones.
Background:
Get to know the person more:
- ¿Me puedes contar cómo es un día típico suyo? ¿Cual es la próxima cosa que haces?
- ¿Cuáles redes sociales usa? ¿Los usa todos los días?
Rough translations:
- What does your typical day look like? What do you do next?
- What social media apps do you use? Do you use them all every day?
Build Rapport:
- Diría que tiene muchas cosas que hacer en su día, o que siempre le queda un poco de tiempo libre? ¿Cómo organiza su día?
- ¿Cómo incorpora las redes sociales en su día? ¿Cuánto tiempo pasa en las redes sociales?
- ¿Cuando está en las redes sociales, que hace la mayoría del tiempo en esas plataformas? ¿Para que los usa?
Rough translations:
- Would you say that you are very busy everyday, or that you always have a bit of free time?
- How do you incorporate social media into your day? How much time do you spend on social media?
- When you are on social media, what do you spend most of your time doing on the platforms? What do you use them for?
Demo:
- ¿Cómo se metería a su cuenta de (red social)?
- ¿Usa todos los iconos que están aquí?
Rough translations:
- How would you log into your (social media) account?
- Do you use all the icons here?
Evoke Stories + Explore Emotions:
- ¿Hubo algún momento cuando encontró algo relacionado a la organización o características de una red social que le fue muy beneficioso? ¿Podría describir ese momento?
- ¿Qué aspecto te gustó más que todo de lo que describiste?
- ¿Hubo alguna vez cuando tuvo problemas haciendo algo o navegando una red social? ¿Podría describir ese momento?
- ¿Qué diría que contribuyó más que todo a su confusión?
Rough translations:
- Were there any moments where a feature on a social media platform or the organization on a social media platform turned out very beneficial for you? Could you describe that moment?
- What aspect did you like most of all from what you described?
- Were there any times where you had trouble doing something on or navigating a social media platform? Could you describe that moment?
- What would you say contributed the most to your confusion?
Demo:
- ¿Me podría enseñar como usted chatea con alguien?
- ¿Me podría enseñar como buscar a alguien?
- ¿Para navegar de aquí a allá, como lo hace?
Rough translations:
- Could you show me how you chat with someone?
- Could you show me how to search for someone?
- To navigate from here to there, how would you do it?
Reflection:
- ¿Cuando hablabas de esto, parecía (emoción)? ¿Por qué?
- Mencionó que usa las redes sociales por estas razones. ¿Cuáles son de más importancia para usted?
Rough translation:
- When talking about this, you seemed (emotion)? Why so?
- You mentioned that you use social media for these reasons. Which of those reasons would you say are most important for you?
Wrap up:
(Roughly same wrap-up for Interviewee 1, translated into Spanish)
Gracias por su tiempo. Obtuve mucha información interesante de esta entrevista. Aprendí como personas de más edad, que quizás no están tan familiarizadas con las redes sociales, y tecnología en general, incorporan estas plataformas en sus vidas. Mi idea para una red social es hacerlo muy simplista, que solo tenga suficientes opciones para que los usuarios puedan hacer las cosas más comunes que hacen en estas plataformas mucho más eficiente.
Summary
As a housewife, Lucia starts her day by exercising and then taking great care of her home and cooking for her family. After preparing and eating lunch and at night, she takes a break by browsing Facebook, the only social media platform she uses. It is her main way to stay connected to family and friends from her native country and in her new home country. This and seeing that some friends used Facebook to obtain key information, such as information about colleges/universities for her kids, led her to join the platform. Since her relatives make posts and keep her updated on the lives of relatives and friends, she returns the favor by also making posts of her family. Lucia told me that when she does find herself busy, she avoids using Facebook. The reason why really resonated with me: she mentioned that, for example, if she likes someone’s post, since everyone can see that she liked it, she feels obligated to check and like everyone else’s posts. This heavily turned us into a talk about privacy on Facebook, including what it had fixed and what it was still lacking.
Lucia showed that she really values privacy and really liked how Facebook seemed to have gotten rid of the showing up of likes to non-friends. As a person who, despite trying to avoid social media, is more comfortable with it, I wondered if the issue was that the privacy settings for these cases were simply not easy to navigate to, and that therefore Lucia had dismissed it as something that she could not configure. My suspicion gained a bit of credibility when I asked Lucia to show me how she configured one of the settings she liked, which was making her friends list private. She was not able to remember how to get to the setting, and could not tell from the options available on the Settings page, meaning that there were still privacy settings that were obscure to many simply because they are wary of navigating into what seems to them as the uncharted territories of the app. Lastly, when asking her about the navigation bar on Facebook, she told me that she mainly used two of the five icons, and did not find much use for the others. Despite there being a “Friends” icon on the navigation bar, she showed me that she accessed her friends list by going to her profile first and then going to the section with her friends, which signaled some redundancy to me. To Lucia, Facebook provided everything she expected from a social media platform, which is the main reason why it is the only one she uses.
Design Opportunities
Mary mentioned that LinkedIn provided a lot of the information about the candidates she was researching, and Lucia mentioned that she usually looked for information like her friends list by visiting her profile. There seems to be a lot of information that people naturally associate with a person’s profile. In the case of Lucia, even though there was a “Friends” icon on the navigation bar, she chose to go to her profile to find her friends list, making the aforementioned icon irrelevant. When visiting the “Friends” icon just to see what it did, it has a friend request notification. This also seems irrelevant when one of the other icons on the navigation bar is for notifications. I believe there is a great opportunity here to explore how to create a navigation bar that contains as little overlapping functionalities as possible, while still providing useful features that can serve as shortcuts for various actions the user may want to take. Removing redundant functionalities from the navigation bar would help the platform’s design feel less cluttered for users. However, those unused roads can also be turned into new useful features for users or direct to more obscure functionalities.
Both Mary and Lucia mention that they use social media to stay connected with friends and family. These are clearly key aspects that people look for in social media apps. Mary also mentioned how she uses Pinterest specifically for arts and crafts and DIY inspiration. There currently exists a broad range of social media platforms that each target different types of groups or interests/needs of users. An important design opportunity to explore is: how much and which of these groups or interests/needs should a platform whose purpose is to be simplistic should this platform target, and to what extent should it target each? A social media platform that tries to target many different areas will have a harder time avoiding a cluttered design while providing efficient navigation to the various resources it must provide, but it would allow users to stop worrying about visiting multiple apps for different purposes. Should a “super app” be made?
Both Mary and Lucia mentioned that they preferred social media platforms that are secure and maintain their privacy. Lucia had struggled (and ultimately failed to find) key privacy settings, specifically the privacy setting for her friend list, that she deemed very important to her. This is a great opportunity to explore how privacy settings can be made more accessible to users and give them greater control over who gets to see their data. There are many people who care a lot about their privacy but are not aware of what they can toggle because those options are not what they usually see on the pages they visit the most. Making privacy settings more present in the design of the platform can help empower users and make them feel more confident using the platform now that they can take control more easily.