Chapter 1: Social Media Needfinding
💡 Interview Hunch
Designing a social media for farmer groups, under farmer's needs**
1. Background
Over last year,I was developing a hardware to improve beekeepers' productivity by automatically capturing the environmental data and provide note taking tool for them.
I aim to further create a social-media platform for farmers, specifically beekeepers now, as a prototype app for the growing beekeeping communities.
2. Interview Preparation
2.1 Interviewee Selection
Consider the classical identity for social media users, I divided my target interviewee to two categories:
The "posters": People who post contents on social media, such as internet celebrities
The "readers": People who mostly receive information from social media
2.2 Interview workflow:
The general interview is divided into five main topics: following the 5W1H principle, but tailored for different personal and personal situation for each of the interviewees.
Self-Introduction:
- Introduction and Goal of the Assignment
- Request for Audio/Video Recording Permission
Body Questions:
- WHAT: Defining Social Needs
- WHO: Identifying Target Audience
- WHY: Identifying Social Motives
- WHERE + HOW: Interaction Patterns
- WHEN: Time to Socialize
In-depth Questions:
- Persona-specific Questions
- Advantages, Pain Points, and Value Identifying
- Technical Questions - Defining Some Details
Please refer below for prepared question pool for each persona:
Question Pool for the "Reader" Persona
Question Pool for the "Poster" Persona
3. Interview Reports
Detailed Interview Conclusions
3.1 The "Reader" : Cutey Meng Huang
"Social media is a source of my life"
Identity Card: Cutey
- Professional internet and map product manager
- 5+ years of product experiences, worked at Tencent, Alibaba, now a senior PM at Unity China, a keen instinct finding the key needs and pain point
- Heavy user of social media networks, with a wide range of hobbies and many friends from social platform
Foundation Talks:
As a heavy social network user, Cutey's social network is built by interests. While having many friends, she keeps a line between each social group, isolating herself between virtual and reality. We found that social network has different types and serve different people, which includes private messaging, text+imaging, and video sharing. Relationships often start with public platforms. When people establish a closer connection, they tend to switch to a private messaging platform. We also discussed converting online relationships to offline ones. We found that the conversion rate is relatively low when the purpose is to meet the opposite sex; whereas the conversion rate is relatively high for common interests in hobbies and games. I found people tend to have their intuitions of intimacy defined by social software. This is a parameter that needs the software designer to consider seriously.
Interesting Findings:
We discussed the importance and chances behind anonymity. First, anonymity is important, but not always, especially when making serious decisions. We talked about a niche app called "2 Dogs" that connects single young adults with higher educational backgrounds. The platform is carefully designed to be not anonymous, to meet the need for filtered people who want to quickly find their partners. Abanding anonymity is not always a solution to internet trolling. We discussed South Korea, where everyone should use their real name on social media. However, trolling and attacks still widely exist. She believes trolling's inner motivation is the physical separation that makes people aggressive.
3.2 The "Posters" : Bee Brother and Zhen Kai
Identity Card: Bee Brother (Xiangye Xiaoge)
- Professional farmer & beekeeper
- A Chinese Internet celebrity in the beekeeping world
- Posted videos for 6 years, 100, 000+ followers on 5+ mainstream social platforms in China
Identity Card: Zhen Kai
- Daily short-video poster
- Family beekeeper for over 2 generations
- Posted videos for 1 year. Frequent up-loader but struggling to raise followers (Currently 1000+)
"Social media makes me feel exists and needed"
Foundation Talks:
Both interviewees are professional beekeepers with more than 5 years of experience. They use built-in video editing tools to finish videos at a fast pace, and update on most of the mainstream video social networks in China: TikTok, Kuaishou, and WeChat Moments. Because of higher quality and longer durations, Bee Brother is more successful than Zhen Kai. Bee Brother has more than 100,000 followers from 5+ years of continuous efforts. Both of them believe that social networks enable them to earn higher incomes and find more customers, especially special ones like professional services such as farm visits.
Interesting Findings:
Interestingly, both farmers have not accepted advertisements. Key reasons include the follower has not met their expectations and restrictions and obligations by the providers. Both farmers did online streaming but abandoned it because one one-man couldn't handle the workload of online streaming and selling. The farmer also mentioned the growing complexity of current video social network apps.TikTok requires to deposit of $3000 to be able to sell goods, in exchange for security and indemnify. Also related to privacy, my intriguing finding is the posters' growing need for identity isolation from their families and local friends. The posters deliberately banned all people who knew him locally or nearby, to avoid abrupt visits and embarrassment by finding he was the poster on the internet. Lastly, we have to pay attention to designing an app that suits farmer's production environment. With heavy equipment such as gloves, chaotic bee farms, elderly age, and less-educated on average, it is necessary to include accessibility design in such apps.
4. Design Opportunities
Anonymous:
Carefully design the Identity system, making both posters and readers able to identify people from existing networks, and be able to ban people that they don't want.
Vague location-based socialization:
Beekeepers need constant change in their locations to farm the bees, and to find the best flower source. Currently, such information is not shared, but the flower resources are sufficient for sharing. It is possible to enable socializing based on vague location information sharing.
Accessibility:
The farmer groups consist of the elderly and less educated groups. They have poor eyesight and may have difficulties typing or learning using electronics. The honey production environment is also complex and chaotic outdoors, making it hard to read the screen facing the sun. The design should provide the user with the option to enlarge the texts and UI elements, making them high contract and the overall UX design easy to use.
Knowledge sharing:
More and more younger generation is stepping into the farming industry, but many of them lack the necessary skills and knowledge. Besides, with the increasing climate change, extreme weather is becoming more frequent. Even experienced farmers may face situations that they haven't seen before. Therefore, a knowledge-sharing and collaboration platform is necessary. Higher skilled farmers will be able to collaborate and offer help to the rookie farmers.
Data driven:
It is possible to gather historical environment data from the IoT beehives. So we can use the data as supporting material when asking questions and sharing status, just like what we do in many exercise apps.
Reference:
The 5W1H Method : Project Management defined and applied: https://www.wimi-teamwork.com/blog/the-5w1h-method-project-management-defined-and-applied/
Image Credits:
Persona: Listen icons created by berkahicon - Flaticon https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/listen
Headshots are provided by interviewees
Address location icons created by Tanah Basah - Flaticon https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/address-location
Big data icons created by kornkun - Flaticon https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/big-data
Share icons created by Freepik - Flaticon https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/share
Accessibility icons created by icon_small - Flaticon https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/accessibility
Anonymous icons created by Slidicon - Flaticon - https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/anonymous