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A social media app designed for creatives.

8TIV

8TIV is an IOS-based social media prototype that aims
to provide creatives with a safe space to share and connect
within niche communities.
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(October - December 2020)
Role: UI Design

PROTOTYPE
OverviewResearchMODELINGREQUIREMENTSFRAMEWORKREFINEMENTS

OVERVIEW

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8TIV is an IOS-based social media prototype that aims to provide creatives with a safe space to share and connect within niche communities. We found that current social media platforms are tailored toward general uses and don't allow the user to fully separate their creative content from personal uses. We sought to design an app that addresses this difference by:

  • Focusing on sharing creations.
  • Addressing community & specificity.
  • Suppressing spam & focusing on creative communities.
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This project was created by a group of four, including Kaylen Hembree, Keily Neiman, and team leader Benjamin Uranga.

Together we collaborated in implementing Goal-Directed Design (GDD) to create 8Tiv.

Open prototype.

My Role

  • UI Design Developed a high-fidelity interface prototype that illustrates how the app functions and addresses our primary user’s goals.
  • Graphics Created an original illustration for our persona and constructed our competitive analysis.
  • Research Assisted in the research phase of the design process. Helped mediate user interviews and one usability test.
  • Frameworks Assisted in creating the information architecture and user flows of our design.
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It is important to note that this is strictly an academic project. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, we’ve collaborated virtually via Discord, Miro, and Figma.

Introduction

The most polarizing social media apps today include Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, and more. What these apps have in common is that they all focus primarily on showcasing ourselves and gaining popularity. What these existing products fail to address is community and specificity, as they are tailored toward general uses, and don't allow the user to fully separate their creative content from personal uses.

Goal Directed Design

As mentioned before we tackled this project using Goal-Directed design, a design method developed by Alan Cooper. It’s crucial to the design process as it helps us understand users’ goals, needs, and motivations to produce an effective human-centered design.

Goal-Directed design has six stages: Research, Modeling, Requirements, Frameworks, Product Refinement, and Support.

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From About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper

RESEARCH

Research is always the first step that helps the team better understand information regarding the realm of the app, such as the user’s goals, the environments it will be used in, and past applications that function similarly. The research phase is crucial to setting the team up for success. Despite our circumstances due to the pandemic, we were able to effectively conduct and analyze substantial research.
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  • We held a Kickoff Meeting that introduced our challenges, assumptions, and ideas for the oncoming project.
  • We spent time gathering artifacts that are related to our domain and information from competitors for a Literature Review.
  • From our gatherings, we conducted a Competitive Analysis to compare and contrast apps with similar goals to ours.
  • We then made our assumptions on who our users would be and conducted User Interviews for more insight as to who would be using the app and why.
  • Lastly, we synthesized our findings from the User Interviews to create a Persona that will guide us for the rest of the Goal-Directed Design Process.
Research report.

Kickoff Meeting

The main purpose of conducting a Kickoff Meeting is to gain insight into the base elements for a product and how stakeholders think about their product, their users, and possible design problems.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were unable to hold face to face meetings. Accordingly, we have done our work virtually by utilizing the online Collaborative Whiteboard, Miro. This tool allowed us to do everything we needed to do in person, starting off with our Kickoff Meeting. 

With the aid of a Kickoff meeting worksheet, we brainstormed some assumptions about who our users will be and the problems they may face regarding social media usage and creativity alike. Since we have no actual stakeholders, the worksheet helped us to think about the possible business goals and opportunities stakeholders would seek. 

We concluded the meeting with a problem statement: 
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"The current state of social media has focused primarily on showcasing ourselves. What existing social media apps fail to address is creativity, community, and specificity. Our mobile app will address this gap by putting more focus on the things that users create and share."

Literature Review

Next, we conducted a Literature Review, which is when the design team gathers any relevant information about an existing product or domain. We collected internal documents, industry reports, and web searches related to existing social media platforms. We found negative and positive reviews of these platforms so that we could know what aspects to avoid, and which aspects of these apps were more favorable.

To compare and analyze our competitors efficiently, we created a competitive analysis chart that highlights the key pieces of information about each of them. This was needed so that we could get an idea about the current state of capabilities in regard to our domain.

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Competitive analysis created using Excel.

Persona Hypothesis

To begin our research process, our team began with the Persona Hypothesis, which is the initial assumption about how our potential personas might behave.

We brainstormed and thought about what possible users would be interested in 8Tiv, what type of behaviors they might have, and what their end goals might look like.

Our team narrowed our persona hypothesis to two types of possible personas:

  1. Our first and potential primary persona is a creative person who is seeking and desiring a community of other creatives that share the same interest.
    Goal:     This person needs an outlet to share their work, find inspiration, and collaborate with other people in their field of interest. This person is also wants to make money from their creative venture.
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  2. Our second possible persona is someone who is interested in a creative field and is looking for guidance or a stepping-stone to begin. ‍
    Goal:     Follow more experienced creatives to see how they should begin their experience in any field.

Once we got a general idea of our potential users, we began searching for interview candidates to get solid data on the behaviors of actual users.

Persona brainstorming snippet.

User Interviews

Due to some changes in our university’s Institutional Review Board, the process of getting approved to do user research would take too long for the deadline that we were given. Thus, we had to resort to only interviewing students within our class.

Thankfully, our degree program is filled with creative students, so we were able to get valuable data. All interviews were conducted on video calls through Discord.

After each interview, our team that was available for the interview regrouped and discussed the results. We then created an Affinity Map to organize our data.

Discord interview with Amali.
Affinity mapping data from interviews.

What stood out the most to us among all of our participants:

  • Has the desire to have freedom in how they want to express themselves creatively. 
  • All of the participants made separate creative accounts that do not connect to their personal accounts so that they could freely share their work.
  • All used their creative accounts to connect with other creative people in the same field.
  • The majority of our participants also used their passion to venture into the business world. They used their passion to make money and gained clients and following for that through their social media. 
  • All of the participants want user interfaces that are visually centered in order to properly display their work. 

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Overall, the affinity mapping set us up for our transition into the Modeling Phase to build our Primary Persona.

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MODELING

Having a Persona to refer to makes sure that we are accommodating our users’ goals and needs during the Frameworks Phase. 
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Based on research results and affinity mapping, we were able to create a primary persona but no secondary or other types of personas for this stage. My team members used the results to create our primary persona for the app, Davina Shepherd. Based on her narrative, I was able to create an illustration based on Davina.

Davina, primary persona.

REQUIREMENTS

A Requirement is what's needed to exist on the app so that personas can achieve their goals. It connects the gap between research and design by using personas to create stories that express user satisfaction. We do this by putting the Persona into a Context Scenario, and this is essentially a story that explains how a product fits into the Persona’s life and how it helps them achieve their goals.

"insert here"

Using the Context Scenario, we made a list of Requirements that 8tiv needs to allow users to efficiently meet their goals. During our meeting, we reread the context scenario together and listed the capabilities 8Tiv needed to allow Davina to meet her goals.

List of requirements for 8TIV.

FRAMEWORK

This next stage allows us to prioritize elements and think about what content is most relevant to users before jumping straight to prototyping. First, we created a key-path scenario; the primary pathway a Persona takes with the greatest frequency. We wanted to focus on uploading content first. Since we could not collaborate in person, we used wireframe tools on Miro to complete this step.

8TIV wireframe.

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Next, we branched out and created several paths to validate our list of requirements until we were left with a completed Wireframe.

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8TIV wireframe expanded.

REFINEMENTS

After the full prototype was completed, we reached out to two of our classmates for Usability testing. This ensured that we notice any issues before finalizing the design. Based on the feedback we got, I went back and made a few changes:

  • Fixed pathing inconsistencies.
  • Made navbar icon sizes consistent.
  • Gave clarity to features so that users could better understand the purpose of those options.

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