Social Media Needfinding

Interview plan

Background

Personally, I have deleted the Instagram app from my phone so many times, but every time after maybe two weeks I would download and install the app on my phone again. Whenever I deleted the app, I had strong reasons, like focusing more on my classes or exams. However, after a few weeks, I would feel anxious that I need to keep myself updated about my friends and need to catch up, or I would feel that I need some kind of easy entertainment. I acknowledge that social media has affected my mental health in both positive and negative ways.

For this interview, I decided to first do some research regarding the impacts of social media on mental health. I found an interesting fact in the first article, “sixty-four percent of U.S. adults say social media has a mostly negative impact on life in this country, but 72 percent maintain at least one social media account, according to data from Pew Research Center.” This sentence really struck me. This inspired me to design an app that my users do not feel guilty or anxious while using it.

As a designer, I want to minimize the negative impact of social media. Additionally, my research area is AI, and I am interested in exploring how we could facilitate app designs using AI, so I would like to integrate AI in this design, as well. I designed my interview questions around this topic so that I could find features that I could work on to reach my goal.

Questions:

Based on the conversation flow, I have asked more questions than the following questions. However, these questions were for starting a new topic.

1.Tell me about your academic background, social life, and your cultural background.

2.Walk me through a day of your life, specifically, I am interested to know how frequently you check your phone and what you are looking for when you check your phone.

3.Which social media app do you use most and why?

4.Have you ever deleted any social media app or made any changes in your usage of social media? If yes, what was that and why?

5.How has social media affected your mental health? Do you feel happy, excited, or anxious when you use social media?

6.How has social media affected your life in general, like academically or socially?

7.How important is the range of connections to you? Do you care to be connected to a friend from high school that you are not going to see again?

8.Within an app, have you ever found any feature helpful to make you happy?

9.Have you ever used ChatGPT to create content for your post or text message? How was your experience?

Interview Participants:

My criteria for choosing interviewees are their personalities, how frequently they use social media, and where they are from. I chose two people with different personalities and cultures so that I could have sample data from different groups of people.

The first participant is Grace Chang. She has so many friends but spends more time with a few close friends. Additionally, she had deleted her Instagram account a few years ago.

The second interviewee that I selected is an undergrad senior from Romania, studying at MIT. She is friends with some TikTok influencer and uses social media a lot, more than me.

First Interview, Grace Chang

Raw notes

1.Tell me about your academic background, social life, and your cultural background

• Graduated from Wellesley in 2023 and started working at Microsoft as a full-time software engineer.
• Born in Illinois but lived in four different cities and two different countries.
• Chinese-American
• Not introverted but prefer to spend time with smaller groups of people and having a deeper connection to them

2.Walk me through a day of your life, specifically, I am interested to know how frequently you check your phone and what you are looking for when you check your phone.

• Immediately after I wake up, I check my phone, and if there are lots of notifications, I would clear most of them unless there is an emergency
• I would response during my break time
• At work, I look at my phone frequently but if there is no important notification, again I would clear all the notifications.

3.Which social media app do you use mostly and why?

• WeChat, to talk to my parents. Why? Because in China it is common to use WeChat.
• FaceBook, Messenger, Discord, Microsoft Team.
• When I joined Microsoft, we had to use Team, and it was fairly easy to pick up.

4.Have you ever made changes in your usage of social media?

• I used to have Instagram, but in my sophomore year of college, I deleted my Instagram. The reason was that I wanted to focus on recruiting. Additionally, Instagram made me underestimate my life just because Instagram makes me compare my life with others.
• “Deleting Instagram helped me to grow as an individual.”

5.How does social media affect your mental health?

• Mixed effect, it helps me to be in touch with my family and friends
• I use WeChat to watch reels, which is not very helpeful

6.How about your life?

• There are lots of useful information on Facebook, like Marketplace, Microsoft employee page, neighborhood group
• Facebook has options that facilitate my life

7.How important is the range of connection to you?

• Staying in touch with my close friends and family is more important than following people who I might have seen one time on Instagram, so that is why I do not enjoy Instagram.

8.Within an app, have you ever found any feature helpful to make you happy?

• Facebook used to show the posts in chronological order, which was nice because I could keep track oldest or newest posts.
• It makes me happy that I have different options to organize posts on Linkdin.

9.Have you ever used ChatGPT to decide to contact someone? To create the content

• One time, I had to write a very long, confrontational text to someone, which it was very stressful, and I used ChatGPT. However, because I enjoy typing messages to people, I have never used ChatGPT for casual texting with my close friends

Summary and analysis

Grace wants to prioritize her personal life, and that is why she deleted her Instagram account and found her in a happier spot. However, she still follows and watches reels on Wechat. That seems to be a contradiction to me and interesting. I think the pleasant feeling of being in touch with family is associated with WeChat, and because of that Grace does not feel guilty about watching reels on WeChat. The same is true about Facebook. She would spend some time watching reels and posts on Facebook, but she feels that using Facebook is productive in her life. Additionally, although she wants to prioritize her work, there is still pressure to check her phone even at the workplace, when she faces lots of notifications, she ignores all of them. She tries to balance her connection with close friends and avoid useless content of random posts and reels.

One interesting thing that I have never paid attention to is the structure of the first page of social media when you open it. She would use Facebook to check out Marketplace but not Instagram to visit business pages. She mentioned that in order to find a business page on Instagram, a person needs to go to the explore section, which you face lots of other posts and reels, while on Facebook you can directly go to Marketplace with one click on the first page, and you wouldn’t be distracted by lots of random posts and reels.

Another point that I found interesting is that she said, “I enjoy thinking and typing to my friends.” This really questioned one of my thoughts about using generative AI for texting.

Second Interview, Teo Stan

Raw notes

Questions: 1.Tell me about your academic background, social life, and your cultural background.

• I was born and grew up in Romania.
• I moved to the USA for my college when I was eighteen years old.
• I am extrovert both in real life and social media. I enjoy posting on social media.
• I post a story in Instagram on average once a day.

2.Walk me through a day of your life, specifically, I am interested to know how frequently you check your phone and what you are looking for when you check your phone. How do you feel every time that you check any of your social media?

• When I wake up in the morning, the very first thing that I do is to check my Instagram and Facebook account, and especially in the morning I really feel guilty about doing so.

3.Which social media app do you use mostly and why?

• I use Instagram because I am connected to more people, especially people around my age
• I feel like Facebook is for older people.

4.Have you ever made changes in your usage of social media?

• I have deleted Instagram so many times, usually before exams, but even when I delete the app I would log into my account through Web.

5.How does social media affect you mental health?

• Gives me lots of anxiety.
• When I spend more than 25’ I push my phone away. Especially in the morning, and depending what content I see in the morning, that sets my mood for the whole day.

6.How about your life?

• The main reason is to know what people are doing, Who they are dating. I follow the press, like the New York times and Washington post, I keep myself up to date with those. The amount of things that I learn is not proportional to the time that I spent.
• However, the amount of knowledge that I gain from social media is far less than the amount of the time I spend on social media.

7.How important is the range of connections to you?

• I like to see what my old friends are doing. I have 1200 followers! If I stop following them, it gives me anxiety.

8.Within an app, have you ever found any feature helpful to make you happy? What is it?

• Love filtering by location and other things in LinkedIn.
• In Instagram, there is a new feature, they ask if I am interested in the reel that I am watching. I really like it. It makes the further reels more toward what I enjoy

9.Have you ever used ChatGPT to write a text message or to help you to use social media?

• Yes, lots of time! to reply to the person who I didn’t know well.
• I was satisfied with the vocalubulary that ChatGPT offer. Since English is my second language, it is super helpful
• I tried ChatGPT to create caption for my Instagram post, but it felt fake, it wasn't as casual as I expected

Summary and Analysis

Social media's impact on her mental health was described as anxiety-inducing, especially when spending too much time on it. Her mood for the day could be influenced by the content she encountered in the morning. Teo emphasized the importance of maintaining connections with old friends and expressed anxiety about unfollowing people. She uses social media for other reasons, including following the press and news. However, she believes that everytime that she checks Instagram to read some news, she would also get distracted by other posts and reels. she also highlighted specific features in social media apps, such as filtering by location in LinkedIn and the personalized content recommendation feature in Instagram.

Finally, she uses ChatGPT for various social media-related tasks, including composing text messages, generating content like captions, and she was happy with the results because she found right words to use with ChatGPT.

Design Opportunity

Text and Image generation

Texting or emailing someone who is important and we do not know well is stressful. Additionally, English might be the second language of someone, and they need to reply quickly. Generative AI can be handy. Having different tabs open for ChatGPT is a solution for these cases. However, it takes time if we need to reply quickly.

Creating captions can also be stressful for some people and time-consuming, or we might want to use a new meme to make our chat funny with our friends.

These are all situations where generative AI can be helpful. However, it is tricky how to integrate it so that people would be willing to use it. As Grace mentioned, sometimes people enjoy typing by themselves, so this feature might not be useful always.

First page design

The way that a user navigates to get the information that they need matters a lot. When you open Instagram, the first page is distracting. This is something that could be explored. I believe that it should be simple and organized

Time and Content Management

Recently, a person can manage how long they use different apps. They can even block an app after a certain amount of time. However, the New York Times might upload lots of important posts that I need to follow and read, or if someone has a time limit for Instagram, they might want to use that time limit to read some scientific posts. As Teo mentioned, the amount of useful information that we learn from social media is not proportional to the amount of time that we spend. Therefore, there is an opportunity to define some metrics or features to evaluate that.

Persolinazed design

Other than having a simple first page, I think users should be able to personalize the sections that they want to and the way they want to organize the content within each section. Grace enjoys seeing the posts from friends in chronological order, but Teo wants to filter posts on Linkedin based on location.

This is not an easy problem to solve, because if I want to include all the options for sections and filtering, there are quite a few possibilities. I believe that AI can be useful to solve this problem.