Link to Interactive Prototype

Role

User Research: User Interviews, Persona Mapping, Journey Mapping, Empathy Maps.

UX Design: Sketches, Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Testing.

Understanding the Product

User Interview

The purpose of this user interview is to gain a deeper understanding of the Twitter instant messaging feature from the perspective of current users. I have developed some hypotheses based on my own research and personal experience, and I will use this interview to validate or challenge these ideas.

• Hypothesis

  Twitter users want to;

  1. Start new conversations or move conversations off a timeline

  2. Share tweets or media to an individual or group

  3. Add unknown messages to the spam box

• Potential Pain Points

  1. Lack of direct reply to a text

  2. Interface looks too bland

  3. Unable to edit or delete a message for all parties

  4. A lot of spam messages

• Interview Scripts

  1. Current situation

  2. Gender

  3. Twitter usage(messaging)

  ---

  1. How often do you text on Twitter? How is it?

  2. What feature do you like most about twitter and why?

  3. Do you text people on twitter? If so, how often(walk me through it)?

  4. How was the experience? Did you find the messaging feature helpful? Or did you encounter some obstacles?

  5. What don’t you like about the Twitter messaging feature, why?

• Response Summary

  I interviewed 5 participants across my community and they had good perspectives about Twitter instant messaging feature. The responses were as follows;

  • Participant 1

    1. I use twitter really well, about 4 hours everyday. I really like twitter, it makes me view different opinions on a trending topic.

    2. I like the ‘trends for you’ feature, it makes me updated on things going on around me. I just come on twitter and read up on trending topics, air my opinions about it and read other opinions too.

    3. Yeah I text my friends on twitter, I share them tweets. I just open the chat tab, search for their usernames and text them.

    4. Well it’s good and it’s really helpful to be honest. I just dislike the fact that I can’t reply a text directly on Twitter like Whatsapp, rather I have to copy and paste then type my response underneath.

    5. The chat interface is too dull, the aesthetics should be better.

  • Participant 2

    1. I don’t really use twitter, I just come on the app to complete my NFTs tasks, retweet the community’s tweet. It’s a good app generally.

    2. I love the ‘bookmark’ feature, it makes me save whatever tweet I want to read or go through later. It’s a life saver.

    3. I don’t really text people on twitter but I get messages once in a while, just about 2/3 messages in a week max. So I wouldn’t say I use it often.

    4. My Twitter experience is okay and I think it might be helpful for people who really use it. One issue I have is that I get a lot of spam messages which sometime are hack links, I have gotten my account hacked because of I tapped on one of those hack links. It’s frustrating!

    5. I think It’s just the spam messages I said earlier. I think it should be eliminated.

  • Participant 3

    1. I’m always on twitter, about 5/6 hours everyday. Twitter is my home, it just never gets boring to me. I tweet a lot too.

    2. I think I prefer the voice note feature, it helps me when ranting as It hurts my hands to type a lot of alphabets, talking is a lot better. It’s more convenient.

    3. I rarely text people on twitter, in fact I just have one active text in my chat tab. I dislike texting people.

    4. I think it’s okay from the few times I’ve tried it but I don’t have any frustrations nor did i have any obstacles while I was using it.

    5. Well, I feel the chat background looks dead, I’ll love to add some wallpapers or something other than plain black or white.

  • Participant 4

    1. I use twitter everyday. As an aspiring data analyst, I use twitter to ship out my latest projects and I use it to go through memes too. My screen time tells me 3 hours daily, I think that’s fair though.

    2. The ‘share’ feature, I use it to share tweets I find funny to my friends and then we all have something to talk about. It’s really helpful.

    3. I text people and I reply my unread messages, I think I just go there when I have a notification or I really need to text someone. I would say I check it every time I open the app.

    4. It was relatively okay just that I wasn’t able to use some features I’m comfortable with; one was replying a particular text, search in chat. I think these are ‘must have’ features.

    5. I think I would eliminate spam messages completely because they might appear confusing to newbies on twitter.

  • Participant 5

    1. I spend most of my screen time on Twitter, about 11 hours per day. I share music, pictures and my thoughts with my followers. I like influencing people’s decisions.

    2. The Spaces feature, It gives me this study group vibe where I can air my thoughts on a topic and have people criticize them constructively. It’s always fun to be on spaces, I spend most of my time there.

    3. A lot of people text me from spaces because my dms are open to everyone. I love texting people, It reduces my boredom. I chat my recent or I just search the name of the person I want to text.

    4. It’s a needed feature to be honest as people need to have private conversations with one another. My frustration is that I can’t reply a text directly on twitter, It makes the chat look confusing. I would love that to be implemented.

    5. I think I would add a default background in the chat interface, something that aligns with twitter.

• Empathy Map

  Name	Created	Tags
  Rex	@June 12, 2023 10:34 PM
  Sally	@June 12, 2023 10:34 PM
  Brooks	@June 12, 2023 10:34 PM
  Rooks	@June 12, 2023 10:34 PM
  May	@June 12, 2023 10:34 PM

Key Findings from User Interviews

1. A significant number of participants want to be able to reply directly to a text sent by other user(s).

2. Some of the users don’t like how the chat interface looks, they feel it is too dull and aesthetically unpleasing.

3. Few participants prefer to be able to edit and delete their texts.

4. Some participants were really frustrated as a results of the number of spam messages they receive on a daily.

5. A user wanted to be able to search for texts when chatting.

Define

User Persona

• Marley

  👨🏽 Marley

  Age: 19 years old

  Location: Lagos, Nigeria

  Occupation: Student

  Bio

  Marley is a Student at the University of Lagos studying Electrical and Electronics Engineering. Marley’s hobbies are writing, politics and the surfing through social media. Marley is friendly, smart and has a great humor. Marley lives in the school dormitory. His personal saying is “Always be happy!”

  Goal

  Marley wants an effective online communication between him and his friends.

  Frustrations

  Marley has to copy his friend’s text, paste it in the input field and type his response under his friend text. Marley finds this time consuming and stressful.

  Marley’s User Journey

  Action	Tasks	Feeling(emotions)	How it can be improved
  Open his twitter app	1. Find the app icon from his phone and open it	Excited	-
  Tap on the messaging tab	1. Finds the chat tab and taps on it to see if he has unread messages.	Hopeful Happy Uncertain	-
  Reads his friend’s messages and wants to reply one at a time.	1. Copy each of the friend’s messages and type under the messages so his friend can understand the context	Frustrated Stressed	A way to reply directly to a particular text.
  Closes the app	Minimizing the app	Angry	-

  Marley’s Problem Statement

  Marley is a Twitter lover who needs a way to reply directly to texts on Twitter so that his friends can understand the conversations better.

• Kate

  👩🏽‍🦱 Kate

  Age: 18 years old

  Location: Ekiti, Nigeria

  Occupation: Baker

  Bio

  Kate is a Baker who uses Twitter to push her business. Marley’s hobbies are baking, traveling and debating. Marley is funny, inquisitive and shy. Marley lives in a two-room apartment. Her personal saying is “Act more, speak less!”

  Goal

  Kate wants to be able to edit and delete her sent messages on twitter.

  Frustrations

  Kate makes a lot of spelling errors as her native tongue is not English, after sending some messages she realizes that she made a mistake and she wants to correct it as she feels really unsecure about it.

  Kate’s User Journey

  Action	Tasks	Feeling(emotions)	How it can be improved
  Open her twitter app	1. Find the app icon from her phone and open it	Excited	-
  Tap on the messaging tab	1. Finds the chat tab and taps on it to see if she has unread messages.	Hopeful Happy Uncertain	-
  Reads her group chat’s messages and wants to join the conversation.	Type what was on her mind, sends it. Then she realized she made various mistakes.	Frustrated Insecure	A way to edit and delete messages.
  Closes the app	Minimizing the app	Angry	-

  Kate’s Problem Statement

  Kate wants to be edit and delete messages on twitter so that she can correct herself when she makes mistakes and also boost her self-esteem.

• Jack

  👨🏽 Jack

  Age: 25 years old

  Location: Abuja, Nigeria

  Occupation: Technical writer

  Bio

  Jack is a gamer who uses Twitter to connect with other gamers. Jack’s hobbies are playing games, streaming and eating. Jack loves connecting with gamers as he seems to form genuine friendships with only gamers. Nathan wants to meet more gamers as he loves meeting people.

  Goal

  Jack wants to see/add a gamified wallpaper in his chat box.

  Frustrations

  Jack hates seeing his chat background blank. he feels it would be better if there was a default wallpaper or he’s able to add his own wallpaper of his choice.

  Jack’s User Journey

  Jack’s Problem Statement

  Jack is a gamer who hates dull interfaces and wants his chat interface to have a wallpaper so that he can have a better chatting experience.

Current messaging user flow

open the messaging tab > Search user > opens chat > Type using keyboard/record voice note/add media or gifs > send to user > delete message for yourself.

• User flow sketches

  

💡Ideate

How Might We

• How might we redesign Twitter so that Marley can reply a message directly?

  • We can add a swipe to reply action

  • We can add a hold down to reply action

  • We can add a double tap to reply action

• How might we redesign Twitter so that Kate will be able to edit and delete messages?

  • Add a feature that makes holding down a message bring out the edit and delete actions

  • Show both users that message was edited after edit

• How might we redesign twitter so that Jack will be able to use a default or his own personalized background?

  • Add a default background for all users

  • Give users an option to change their backgrounds from the provided ones from the chat setting

  • Also allow users to be able to delete their backgrounds

Ideation Sketches

• Sketches

  

  

✍🏽Prototype

• Paper Sketches

  

  

  

• Low Fidelity Prototypes

  Above is the low fidelity wireframes of the twitter messaging redesign.

• High Fidelity Prototypes

  From the pain points that were defined above, I was able to ideate and come up with features that would solve each users problems. Let’s start with Marley;

  How Marley can reply messages directly;

  

  From the mockup above we can see a chat between Marley and Rosie. Marley wants to reply Rosie’s text where she said “Nothing much, I just finished my application to Kleiner Perkins”. I ideated and I came up with two actions. Marley can;

  • Hold down the text till options come up, then tap on reply- check image below for more context;

  

  • Swipe the text he wants to reply- check image below for more context;

  

  Either of these two methods are valid, after these actions, then the chat preview comes up where Marley can type his intended response under the message he wants to reply. Check image below;

  

  We can see the screen above, As Marley has typed his response, once he hits send, the Message gets replied. Check the screen below for the result of replying a text;

  

  And that way, I believe I was able to solve Marley’s pain point which was how to reply to a text directly.

  How Kate can edit and delete messages

  

  From the mockup above we can see a chat between Kate and Rosie. Kate wants to edit and delete her own text where she said “Oh I’m just sorting out my application rn”. Kate wants to be able to edit her text. So she can hold down the text and an overlay of options come up. See the screen below;

  

  We can see the overlay above, once Kate taps on edit message, the message becomes previewed, ready to be edited. In the screen below, Kate already edited the message to “Oh I’m almost done!”

  

  After editing and Kate taps on the send button, the message becomes edited and also shows both of the conversant that this particular message was edited. check screen below for more context;

  

  Likewise with the delete action, from the options overlay in the first screen above, ONCE Kate taps on delete message for all, the message gets deleted for everyone in the chat and it’s like it never happened. See screen below for more context;

  

  How Jack can use a default wallpaper instead of the plain chat background

  

  Jack wants to be able to use a default wallpaper, Jack can now do that by navigating to the messages settings tab which is the settings icon at the top right of the screen; where he would see wallpaper, notifications and privacy settings.

  

  

  To activate the default wallpaper, all Jack has to do is to toggle on the option and he would already have a custom wallpaper in his chat. If Jack goes back and enter into his chat with Rosie, he would notice the wallpaper in his chat interface. See screen blow for wallpaper implementation;

  

  Now we can see the background above which consists of the twitter logos.

Testing Phase

Regardless of different pain points, I still tested all the improved features out on all the participants and I was able to group them out in my personas;

The testing phase was a success from my ends as these participants were able to find the improved features useful.

Video Prototype- Design Showcase

Here is the link to the prototype of the high fidelity design

Conclusion

If this challenge was not a take-home challenge but rather an actual design challenge for a real life project, there are things I’d do differently;

The design improvements won't just be dependent on the answers of five participants, as there would probably be a UX research team that would do UX research and data analysts that provide real data to back up design decisions. Plus, usually any design with the least effort that leads to the largest impact will be implemented first, so anything is always a collaboration among the engineers, product managers, designers, or other stakeholders.

This is because it might be a small change from the design point of view but for the development team, its a huge task or might not even be implementable. The goal is to make a product that is understandable and accessible by everyone.

Here are other insights that might factor in if this was not a take home challenge;

• UX research teams often use a variety of methods to gather data about how users interact with a product or service. These methods can include user testing, surveys, focus groups, and other techniques.

• Data analysts play a crucial role in interpreting and analyzing the data gathered by UX research teams. They use statistical tools and techniques to uncover trends and insights that can inform design decisions.

• Design decisions are often made through a process of collaboration and negotiation among different stakeholders, such as engineers, product managers, designers, and others. These stakeholders may have different perspectives and priorities, and it is important to find a balance that meets the needs of all parties involved.

• The goal of the design process is to create solutions that are both effective and efficient. This may involve identifying and addressing user needs, improving functionality and usability, and considering the resources and constraints of the development process.