Social Planner

Project Overview

Explore and understand how to improve the user experience for making plans with one another. 

My Contributions

I worked throughout the entire phase of the product’s development cycle which includes user research, mockups, prototyping, and user testing.

Tools used: Figma, Canva

Discovery Phase

The Problem

Users who are working full time jobs find it difficult to make plans with their friends and family. Our goal is to make it simpler for users to make spending time with family stress-free and easy. Social Planner is an app that facilitates making plans much easier by displaying a shared calendar with others in a related group. 

Our Findings

I found, through user interviews and qualitative research, that most users keep track of their schedules and appointments by adding to their calendar. They also communicate with friends and family mostly through text messaging as it is quicker and easier to do. One participant mentioned that they did not want to bother their family by calling them since they aren’t sure if that person would be busy at the moment. Texting provides a much more relaxed and casual environment to keep up with others.

Primary Research: User Interviews

Secondary Research: Online Research

I performed user interviews on 5 different subjects. Through their interviews, I were able to synthesize the data into an affinity map to discover key themes that would help us design our social planning app. Through the user interviews, I found that users tend to keep track of appointments and plans through a calendar. It helps to send reminders and it also helps to see their availability at a glance. I also found that when users go on trips or make small plans with friends and family, it’s usually through many modes of communication (texting, calling, and even emailing) for one plan.

Online research through academic papers and studies were also done to help understand how people communicate with one another. In “Relations of Friends’ Activities to Friendship Quality” by Ravisha Mathur and Thomas Berndt, I found that participating in social activities such as hanging out and traveling helps to foster high quality friendships. This affects your mental and social health. In a study by PLOS Medicine, they found that depression, stress, and anxiety is significantly lowered when social interactions are involved.

In my research, I discovered that people have different ways of communicating based on the location of the person they are trying to contact. In “Understanding Family Communication Across Different Time Zones” by Xiang Cao, Abigail Sellen, AJ Brush, and David Kirk, people tend to spend less time social engaging with others who live far (on different time zones, countries, etc) because they do not want to be a bother. They tend to make plans more with those who are nearby to them. 

User Personas

I created a user persona to help us understand who our user is and who we are designing for. I understand that our targeted users are working employees who lead busy lifestyles. Because of that, it becomes hard to spend quality time with friends and family due to schedule conflicts.

HOW MIGHT WE

Based on my research, I developed some how might we questions to understand the problem of my users and what I could do to help solve that problem.

  1. How might we reduce the stress that people feel when planning activities in their family or friend group?

  2. How might we help users improve the communication between their family members and friends?

  3. How might we help users improve the way they make plans with their friends and family?

Design Phase

Solution

Through research and user interviews, I found that creating an app that allows users to see each other’s availability will significantly help with planning events and trips. Adding a calendar will help users to keep track of their own schedule as well as other people’s schedules, if permitted. Adding a group chatting feature will also help with communicating and keep track of what other members want to do.

Sketches

We began by sketching some ideas of the different features of the app to see how these features could work with one another. We designed some screens that show how the chatting feature would work where users can add plans/activities and notify members directly on the chat. The third image shows a calendar where users can add in their schedules and appointments. Having a visual imagery of a user’s schedules helps them to see when they’re free and able to make plans with their loved ones. 

Final Product

User Flow

I created user flows to help us understand how the app will operate and reduce the stress of navigating the app. The user flow pictured below begins at the onboarding screen and displays the steps to creating a new group and adding members to that group.

Sitemap

I also created a sitemap to organize the information architecture of the app. This will help me to make the app easier to use and less confusing for the users.

Mockups

I designed some mockups of key screens of the app that would display how users can view their calendar, create plans, chat, and add to their itinerary. This gives it a much more lifelike look on what the app will look like and what it can do. 

Style Guide

Below is the style guide used to create the high fidelity design of the app. The use of a soft green color scheme showcases positivity and provides a welcoming and harmonious feeling to users. 

HI FI SCREENS

User Testing

Several iterations were performed on the prototype that we created.

  • Issue 1: Difficulty finding the button to remove group members.

    • Solution: add a “remove member” option onto the direct chat settings, in addition to the current place that it is already located (main groups screen).

  • Issue 2: Users were confused what happens when they do select to remove a member as there was no confirmation page

    • Solution: I added confirmation pages to the member removal screen

Conclusion

Further iterations will be performed to eliminate or reduce any user issues on the app. Several suggestions were made during user testing that will be taken into consideration whether it will be added to the app as a whole. Some suggestions that were made was to implement a shared photo gallery to the app. This is so that users within the group can share photos and memories together in one place, making it more convenient and easy to use.

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