Chatter
Summary
Chatter is a mobile app that lets you connect with your friends anywhere, anytime.
By allowing users to invite their friends spontaneously for a time-limited chat in a room, Chatter lets you avoid the disruption of a phone call and the logistical inconveniences of scheduling a conversation. You can also see what your friends have been talking about with their friends and join in the conversations.
Client: Personal one-person project
Role: Product designer
Timeline: 1 month
Tools: Figma, Whimsical, Miro
Skills: User research, product thinking, UI/UX mobile design, interaction design
Overview
Background
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I found it overwhelming to maintain social connections due to Zoom fatigue and scheduling conflicts. After speaking to other friends, I realized I wasn't the only one feeling this way. Chatter was created as a personal project to solve this need.
Defining the problem
Young adults need a new way to keep in touch with long-distance friends because it’s exhausting to keep texting and difficult to schedule calls.
User research
I made a research plan with questions that aim to understand how young adults currently keep in touch with friends and what they like or don’t like about their system. I then scheduled 30-minute user interviews with 8 people aged 18-25.
Affinity mapping
From the interviews, I created an affinity map and identified some core insights.
Insight 1: People find it hard to catch up with long-distance friends because of lost context
It's easy for people to forget what they might want to talk about when catching up with a friend, resulting in superficial conversations. Sometimes, when their friends don't post much on social media, they don't know what they've been up to, so they don't know what to talk about. Furthermore, explaining the context behind a conversation topic can be exhausting, resulting in people only wanting to talk to those who already understand it.
Insight 2: There are certain tradeoffs between calling and texting
People prefer calling over texting because calling creates more emotional bonds and is less exhausting. However, they do not like the logistic of scheduling phone calls. Sometimes people make random phone calls to catch up with friends, but it’s difficult to do that to acquaintances or friends you have not talked to for a long time.
Persona development
From these insights, I developed the user persona to guide my design process.
Ideation process
“How might we redesign texting and calling to adapt to keeping in touch with long-distance friends?”
First idea: texting + journaling all in one
My first idea is based on inspiration from journaling apps. Since one of the main pain points in keeping in touch with friends is lost context, a semi-private journal that you can share with certain friends will reduce:
the friction of texting: you can share one journal to several friends, making it less exhausting than texting
the friction of keeping each other in the loop: friends do not feel obligated to respond to every journal but still get updated about your life
I tested out a few journaling and relationship tracker apps to get inspiration for features of the prototype.
Wireframes
I then created wireframes to capture the features that I’d like to have in the app.
The journaling features include an activity tracker and text field with limited characters to write down the user’s thoughts. The features are designed to minimize writing fatigue while still capturing key points about what has been going on in the user’s life.
The sharing features allow users to choose which friends to share the journal with based on the group they are in. This helps users prioritize their relationships. In addition, there is a relationship score based on how often the users have interacted with the person, encouraging the user to share more journals with people they have not been in contact with. Finally, the users can see all the journals shared with them through a feed.
User feedback
I pieced the low-fidelity wireframes together in Figma Mirror to get user feedback. Overall, people like the idea of being able to keep in touch with friends in a low-effort way through micro-journals.
However, a few feedback stood out to me:
“It’d be nice to have more mode of communication, like videos or pictures”
“I still have to make efforts to update it”
This prompted me to re-examine my previous user interviews about how people keep in touch with friends. I realized that people prefer calling to texting because it gives more high-fidelity context (as reflected in the feedback about adding videos and pictures) and takes less effort. Therefore, it might be more effective to make calling people easier than creating new ways of texting. This leads me to pivot to a second idea.
Second idea: a low-pressure way for randomly calling friends
From earlier user interviews, I realized that:
People have trouble catching up with friends over the phone, because they lose context and have to explain a lot
The logistics of scheduling phone calls is a pain point
People would like to be able to make random phone calls, but it's difficult to do that to people they haven't talked to in a while
Based on these insights, I decided to design an app that would allow people to catch up with friends easily by providing context and removing the disruptiveness of random phone calls.
Again, I tested out a few social apps that innovate on making video calls fun.
Wireframes
The app has the following features:
Starting a “chatter”: users can create a room for video call and invite friends to it. The room has a description so the recipients know what the callers want to talk about, and there’s a 2-minute limit which help encourage people to pick up (as most people can afford to squeeze in 2 minutes)
Saving a “chatter”: after the call, the participants have the option to save the chat’s metadata (but not the recording) and post it on their feed. This keeps a record of what users have talked about and allow their friends to see, like, or comment on it
Joining a “chatter”: users can join their friends’ chatter room if it is ongoing
Receiving a “chatter”: when users receive a call from friends, they can join the call right away or skip and join later when they are free
User feedback
The user feedback was much more positive this time, with users truly seeing themselves using such a product:
“I love it!! Such a fun and quick way to catch up with friends”
“I’d totally leave some funny comments on my friends’ chats”
“I can see myself scrolling through the feed to guess what my friends have been up to like when I use venmo”
One major feedback I received was that most people didn’t like a default time limit. I decided to fix this in my hi-fi iteration.
The final version
The following is a look at some of the core experiences of the app.
Start a quick chat with friends
Create a room and invite your friends for a video chat. Write a short description and set a time limit to encourage people to pick up and others to join in!
Keep a log of memories together
Save the call’s description and participants and post it on your feed. Keep track of what you have been talking about with your friends and let other friends know what you have been up to.
Join your friends’ conversations and make new friends
Join an ongoing conversation on your feed at any time for a convenient catchup.
Learnings and reflections
A key learning from this project for me was that iteration is always necessary. The feedback for my first idea was lukewarm, and I’m glad that I decided to take a step back to consider the problem from other angles. The overwhelmingly positive feedback for the second version showed that it was a much better solution for the pain point of keeping in touch with friends.
Coincidentally, after I finished the project in March 2020, Clubhouse was released and attracted attention. Their success is a great validation for the idea of audio rooms where users can drop in and out to talk to others. Even though Clubhouse decided to gravitate towards being an audio app for the public square, I believe that it could also have become a great social network app by targeting the use case for maintaining friendships.
If I had more time, I would have conducted usability testing for the high-fidelity prototype. The feedback would have helped to fine tune the app’s design, interface and UI to ensure that the user experience was as smooth as possible. In addition, I would have designed onboarding features to make sure the app’s functions were introduced more clearly.
