Unit 2: The Human Centered Design Process

October 11, 2022

Final Prototype

Table of Contents

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Addiction to Social Media

• Goal: Identify a social media product with an interaction that contributes to addiction and improve it, or create a new interaction within the existing product to reduce addiction to it for the identified primary user.
• Initial research to identify the current design choices that are deceptive
• Determined our primary users would be students that use social media
• Current design patterns are harmful because it encourages users to just use social media often and for long periods of time without benefiting the users
• It prioritizes time spent over enjoyment of the users

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Initial Research

• Each group member focused on a different section initially, and then went through to add more to other parts
• Identifying harmful design trends reminded us of what we learned in the article we read about ethical design. We need to be transparent in our designs and focus on the users’ needs

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Interviews

• Identified information that we couldn’t find through research
• Key information we wanted to find out from interviewees:
• Primary reason for opening a social media app
• Do they feel that they spend a lot of time on social media
• Why?
• Ask them to explain why to identify which design choices are primarily affecting them
• Created an interview script to meet our objectives
• Each of us came up with some interview questions and then we discussed which questions to use
• Made sure to delete any leading questions that may influence an interviewees’ responses such as “Are you addicted to social media?”
• Decided to do 4 interviews so we could each take notes for one and interview for the other
• From the overview of how to interview, we made sure to take notes on what we observe in the interview along with their responses
• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EBfm6_M4n3cKIfauz246Gfcg9bUr7SvAfeH3_fj2CxI/edit?usp=sharing

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Takeaways from the interviews

• Interviewees were all people that we would consider our primary users
• Many of them mentioned that they use social media often
• Part of a routine, such as right when they wake up
• Notifications came up often as a reason for why they would open the app
• Communication is also a common reason that users use social media, so we’ll want to consider how to reduce addiction without taking away from this aspect
• From class discussions about interesting takeaways, we heard about a team that decided to interview someone that doesn’t use social media often
• It helped us reflect on our own interviews, and whether we should’ve considered interviewing someone that was not our primary user as well for a new perspective

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Users open apps when they see a notification

Communicate and keep up with friends

Social media is part of their routine

Synthesis

• We each focused on one interview and turned our insights into sticky notes
• From there we worked together to group similar sticky notes
• As we were trying to group sticky notes, we realized that some of the base level sticky notes were making assumptions or coming to conclusions already when it was supposed to be observations
• We ended up backtracking a bit and revisiting the interviews to replace conclusions with observations and add in quotes
• Some of the yellow-level categories only had a single sticky note, but we felt that it fit well with the broader categories, so we left it in

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Pain Points

From our synthesis board we identified the following pain points:

1. Users’ inability to resist going into the apps after seeing a notifications
2. Some users lose track of how much time they spend on social media
3. Infinite scrolling/waiting features make it hard for them to stay off the app
4. Users may be affected by the contents of social media and generate anxiety
5. Users experience constant social comparison with others on social media because of certain features

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Brainstorming Questions

Based on our pain points, we each came up with some questions to see how we could address our users’ needs. One of the few times we hear of prioritizing quantity over quality

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How might we help users stay aware of the amount of time they’ve spent on social media?

How might we redesign the elements in social media platforms to reduce users’ meaningless viewing but not miss important information?

How might we design features to help users reduce social comparison with others on social media?

How might we redesign social media platforms for healthier communication patterns?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lh5qnD4CRYACwDpHO5QVJu9jyf5oLXXhWBFTvZdXFxg/edit?usp=sharing

User Scenarios

• Following up on the brainstorming questions, we worked on user scenarios to come up with possible solutions
• From the reading about user scenarios and lecture, we knew that we needed to clearly identify our persona, give context into their situation, and then address how our solution would help them in their situation
• One of our user scenarios for solving the question of “How might we redesign the elements in social media platforms to reduce users’ meaningless viewing but not miss important information?”:
• Push notifications constantly disrupt Phoebe during her study, making her inefficient, so she wants to be as free from push notifications as possible without missing important information.She downloaded Notification Helper, an application that allows her to define the types of messages she wants to receive and the frequency. Phoebe thinks she needs to check the information every three hours, so she sets the reminder frequency at 3 hrs. Notification Helper collects messages in the past three hours and sends them to her together at the end of the period. It helps users customize according to their personal needs, including reminder frequency, information filtering, and displayed content. Phoebe doesn't worry about missing important messages, gets fewer impacts by the notifications, and focuses more on her study.

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Storyboard

• Based on the guidelines explained in the Brainstorming lecture, the first panel gives context into the scenario, second panel introduces the problem, third panel is our solution, and the fourth panel is the outcome
• In-Class Critiques:
• Liked how clearly the second panel showed the cognitive load and emotion of the user
• Some confusion over what the “ADDICT” sign in the first panel was referring to

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Hedy’s storyboard presented in class

Wireframing and Lo-fi Prototypes

• Decided to focus our prototype on dealing with distracting notifications
• Worked on making improvements to Screen Time and lifestyle-type apps
• Main features:
• Focus mode: Set a timer and consolidate all notifications until the time is up
• Allow users to select apps where notifications will show up regardless of the timer
• Bedtime mode: would let the user set when they wake up, and then it restricts users from opening social media for the first hour after they wake up
• Interviewees had mentioned that they often open social media apps immediately after waking up

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Wireframe/Lo-fi - Erica

• Used a timer format that would be intuitive to most users
• Have a separate page for urgent notifications so these could bypass the hold on the rest of the notifications
• Kept the interface simple and used toggles for each app
• For the bedtime section, since it’s similar to setting an alarm, I modeled it after the alarm section in a clock app
• I have a navigation bar at the bottom of all the pages to easily navigate back and forth from the different sections

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Wireframe/Lo-fi - Heysu

• Included a summary of total notifications and phone pickups for users to easily see how often they’ve been using each app
• Large hourglass icon on the home screen makes it very clear to users how much more time they have before they can view notifications
• Checkboxes on the focus mode page are intuitive for users, and show that timers can be preset for tasks
• Sleep mode is similar to typical alarm layouts, which will be intuitive to most users

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Wireframe/Lo-fi - Justina

• Notifications itself acts as a reminder of the goals that users set, specifically the amount of time they spend on each social media app
• Gradation of the notification visually shows how much time they have left
• When unlocked (Face ID), it shows the remaining amount of time away from their goal
• Users can set number of hours they allow themselves on the app on a monthly basis
• Users can also view their monthly or weekly progress report to keep track that displays the percentage of their achievement as well as a graph

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Wireframe/Lo-fi - Hedy

• Navigation bar makes it clear to see the different pages
• On the homepage users can choose different modes (study/work/sleep) according to their needs, specify the message frequency, and filter the social media channel and message type
• Alarm page shows the current status and users can see the time remaining to receive notifications
• Data page is a presentation of charts, reports, and statistics
• Users can track the time spent on social media and the focus time here.
• Account page allows users to log in and get different badges as a reward if they keep focus for a certain time.

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Mid-fi

Consolidated all of the ideas from our lo-fi prototypes. The color scheme and general layout was largely based on Heysu’s design.

https://www.figma.com/file/oX6f2wJ19RcAJ62SV81dL7/IxDO-10%2F05?node-id=30%3A200

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Hi-fi

• Added a timer to the focus mode page
• Used icons for the notifications per app to make it easier to view

https://www.figma.com/file/oX6f2wJ19RcAJ62SV81dL7/IxDO-10%2F05?node-id=30%3A201

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Testing

• Tested with 4 primary users
• Came up with an interview plan similar to when we were interviewing for research
• Chose a few tasks to test the usability of the app:
• Use this App to select a preferred mode, like focus mode
• Customize your setting under the focus mode, and select the task under mode
• Check the time you spend on Instagram
• Set alarms
• Things that they liked:
• Easy to set alarm and navigate pages
• Lock screen icon gets the message across clearly
• Data presented in charts is easy to understand
• What can be improved and questions:
• Quicker setup — time needed to set presets may discourage them from using the app
• What happens if a task is finished earlier than planned?
• We would need to consider this further
• If there’s a way to reach notifications earlier by claiming that they have completed the task, then users could easily bypass our solution whenever they want to open an app

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More Testing Takeaways

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• Liked the icons (hourglass, turn on button)
• The necessity of apps notifs v.s. Message notifs?
• How about suggesting the time on social media in total?
• Use the homepage as the first page can be more clear
• Can we make specific mode settings before turning on the mode?
• Do we need to select a mode and task every time?
• What if the task's expected time is longer than the actual time? Users quickly complete their tasks or studies; what should they do?
• Users want to see how much time they spend directly on social media, and some of them are not curious about the number of notifications they receive
• Alarm is quite clear, but unsure about the relation to the mode selection. (question: Do users need to set both?)

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Unit Reflections

• First time working through the five steps of the human centered design process
• Learned how to write an interview plan and got experience with interviewing and note taking
• Brainstorming by writing scenarios was new to some of us and helped with coming up with new ideas
• It was interesting to see how we could all come up with different ideas when we worked individually, and then come together to improve them
• Working in a group let us all bounce ideas off of each other and come up with more effective solutions

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Bibliography

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Brooke Auxier and Monica Anderson, Social Media Use in 2021, Pew Research Center. Published on April 7, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/

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Catherine Price, Trapped – the secret ways social media is built to be addictive (and what you can do to fight back), Science Focus. Published on October 29, 2018. https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/trapped-the-secret-ways-social-media-is-built-to-be-addictive-and-what-you-can-do-to-fight-back/

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Maya Dollarhide, Social Media: Definition, Effects, and List of Top Apps, Investopedia. Updated on August 31, 2021. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/social-media.asp

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Richard Seymour, The machine always wins: what drives our addiction to social media, The Guardian, published on August 23, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/23/social-media-addiction-gambling

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Thomas Wood, How social media Apps’ UX & UI are designed to engage… And be addictive. Komodo, accessed on September 24, 2022. https://www.komododigital.co.uk/insights/how-social-media-apps-ux-ui-are-designed-to-engage-and-be-addictive/

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Vikram R. Bhargave and Manuel Velasquez, Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Socila Media Addiction. Cambridge University Press, published on October 6, 2020. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-ethics-quarterly/article/ethics-of-the-attention-economy-the-problem-of-social-media-addiction/1CC67609A12E9A912BB8A291FDFFE799

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