Needfinding
Official Niche:
I want to build a social media app for artists because DeviantArt is unused and it is hard to find specific art content and inspo on various platforms. I also want to explore the idea of featuring time lapses and finding better ways to help growing artists find inspo help drawing.
Interview Plan:
Start: “Hi my name is Eghosa, I am a junior at MIT. I have a class where we’re working on building a social media app and I’m doing some interviews to figure out how people use social media in your daily (or not so daily) life. Could I interview you for 45 minutes?”.
Interviewee Selection Process:
The first person I interviewed was a 14 year old girl in high school that is very into drawing. I selected her so I could understand what it was like for younger people on social media in general. I selected her specifically because her hobbies are related to the hunch I was looking into. The second person I interviewed was a 50 year old woman. I selected her to understand the older generations' view of social media. She is pretty active on social media for her age group so I wanted to see how adept older people were at navigating these new applications. I selected her because I want to accommodate artists of all ages.
Questions:
General Questions
Which social media platforms are you active on, and how frequently do you use them?
How many social media applications do you use currently? Have you ever used more or less? Why the change?
What scares you about social media?
What is cool about social media?
Tell me about a significant connection you made over social media? Any specific stories?
Tell me about something useful you learned on social media?
How has social media influenced your spending habits?
Have you ever encountered negative experiences on social media, such as cyberbullying or misinformation? How did you handle them?
How do you manage your online privacy and security on social media?
ACTION PROMPTS:
Can I see you scrolling through your favorite social media app?
Niche Specific Questions
How does social media influence your art process?
What types of content do you most enjoy sharing and consuming on social media?
What type of content was the most useful thing when learning how to draw?
Why do you post art? Why do you not post art?
Any experiences with plagiarism? How did you avoid it?
Describe how you currently get inspiration for your art online. What is frustrating?
ACTION PROMPTS: Can I see your saved art inspo? Do you categorize them? If so, how, if not why not?
Interview Notes Plan: I acquired verbal consent from both participants to voice record, so I voice recorded the interviews and didn’t take notes.
Interview Report #1: Violet
Violet is new to social media and has parental restrictions on how much time she gets to spend on her phone at all, so her social media usage is limited to a couple of hours a day. She uses Instagram, Youtube, and Snapchat. Her main fears with social media were about privacy stating “If you post something it follows you forever.” and has all of her accounts private. She likes social media for typical reasons like being able to stay close with her cousin that lives across the country by interacting with each other’s stories, getting an ego boost from likes, and using the “Followed by” feature on Instagram to get connected with people in her new school much quicker. When asked about what she shares on social media, she stated she used to post time lapses of her art on Youtube, stating time lapses were easy to post and watching other time lapses helped her understand other people’s art process. Now she only posts her music on Instagram, as posting her artwork seems more “embarrassing”.
She used to use Youtube for art tutorials but has now stopped because she feels like the content is moreso aimed towards kids (ex. Moriah Elizabeth) and now she looks towards her art teacher more for instructions. She elaborated on her distaste for online art help, stating “The thing about seeing art tips while you’re scrolling on Youtube or Instagram is I always forget to write them down so they aren’t useful to me when I’m actually drawing”. She uses Instagram and Pinterest for art inspiration, similar to me but the way she uses them are completely different, stating she “saves the picture to my computer [via screenshot] so I can zoom in and look at it”. She doesn’t make pinterest boards and when I mentioned the Instagram saved collections feature, she never noticed it was there. Rather low-tech for someone that grew up in the Internet age.
Interview Report #2: Pat
Initially, when asked about her social media usage, I found it interesting that she immediately had a regretful, almost mournful tone, stating “If I said at least an hour that would be lying… I’m sure I spent more than an hour on Instagram alone”. I expected from an older person, she said that social media scares her because young people are addicted to it and wasting their potential. However, when I pointed out how it seems her perception of social media is quite negative, she quickly changed her tune and told a story about how she found fabric to make aso ebi* for her husband’s surprise birthday party through social media and stopped herself from getting ripped off in the process. She was scrolling through her instagram feed and saw a celebrity wearing clothes with fabric from @kubisfabrics and sent a local friend to buy material from @kubisfabrics' in person store in Lagos, Nigeria. ”They put on the fabric price was 70,000 naira but when my friend went to the store they were selling the same one for 80,000”. The store clerks insisted it was a mistake however since Pat knew the real price, they had no choice but to sell the fabric for 70,000 instead of 80,000. She also talked about this pastor that has 200k live viewers broadcasting from a remote area in Nigeria who is richer than many working professionals in Nigeria because social media pays in dollars versus overinflated naira.
I didn’t understand the change in tone until she clarified that she believes using social media for nonsense is bad but she admires people that make content and make money from social media. She is very private about her social media usage and doesn’t connect with people she doesn’t already know, using the “Followed by” feature to ensure that she has multiple mutuals with whoever she accepts. Interestingly, she has varying levels of concern for privacy depending on the platform. She feels like Facebook is full of cloned accounts so she has it private but Instagram she doesn’t mind having it public despite only posting personal family pics and religious quotes. When asked about the explore page she completely forgot it existed and later said scrolling through people she doesn’t know is a waste of time. She has also had experience with cyberbullying when her colleague was posting content bragging about Trump winning against Hilary and she commented saying Trump only won because of an FBI case and a bunch of Trump fanatics attacked her. “We used to be colleagues at the hospital, but when Trump won, she showed herself.”.
Design Opportunities
My application should have a clear way to retrieve previously seen posts. From both interviews, it is very clear that current social media applications have useful features that are completely missed by the average user. For example, Violet didn’t know that she could save her art on Instagram to the saved collections instead of having to manually screenshot her reference pics. The saved collection is nested inside of hidden menus on Instagram and is hard for even me to find sometimes. Plus this would address Violet’s other deterrent from using social media for art inspo, which is the fact that it is hard to remember past tips. Even with current saved features on social media, it is hard to find the right tip when you need it.
Need a way to balance content from familiar people and from new people. In other words, I need the content to be familiar enough to be engaging but different enough so the user can be exposed to new content. Pat completely ignores the explore feed because it is a waste of time, despite the fact that she could find even better fabric or more vendors on it. Untapped potential.
Need a way to make people trust the information shown on my social media site, or need to vet the posted content for accuracy. Violet stated that she couldn’t trust content on social media because people often just spew misinformation, such as creators like OnlyJaysus.