2021
Rochester Institute of Technology
UI Design / UX Design / UX Research
UI/UX Designer, UX Researcher
The goal of this team project was to explore a playful musical application that supports positive and meaningful social interactions between young adults. We researched potential features that augment the human experience and created a prototype showcasing them. We included features such as group music curation, soundtracks based on biometric data, and networking based on shared tastes. Our process involved user research, creating personas, and designing both low and high fidelity prototypes to be tested by the target audience.
Design a social media application that facilitates positive interaction and sharing based on music
UI Design
UX Design
UX Research
1. Identify a problem statement
2. Solidify stakeholders
3. Conduct contextual inquiry
4. Develop an affinity diagram
5. Create personas that capturing user base
6. Design lo-fidelity prototype of application
7. Create high-fidelity, interactive prototype as final product
8. Test prototype using representatives of user base to determine whether or not problem statement has been solved
The stakeholders we identified are as follows:
We crafted a semi-structured interview guide containing questions about social media and music consumption experiences and habits. Participant demographics are shown below. The data from this process was then parsed and categorized into an informative affinity diagram, guiding the design process to keep user needs and desires at the forefront of our minds.
Together, my team followed the process outlined by Alan Cooper for developing personas. From our affinity diagram, participants were mapped along axes representing core functionality, desires, and dislikes. We were able to produce one primary and two secondary personas to represent the population we were designing for. Our main focus was on users who enjoy listening to music with others in a synchronous fashion. Secondary users were asynchronous sharers or listeners who don't enjoy sharing music with others.
We then agreed on a fixed set of features that were deemed musts for a design that satisfied the needs and desires of our personas. The next step was deciding how to implement them. Our work can be found in our InVision Freehand document. At this stage in the project, the team decided on the name Achord for our application. "Accord" is defined as harmony between people or views, something we desire in positive social media interactions. "Chord" is a musical concept of individual notes coming together to make sound with more depth. Intertwined together as "Achord", we believe these words evoke the meaningful social media music experience we seek to create.
01
Purposeful use of color with softer hues & adhering to industry standards
02
Contrast in typeface weight and size create a hierarchy to single out important information
03
Similar component layouts that remain consistent throughout all pages
This lo-fi iteration is broken up into workflows to help alleviate the tangled webs of arrows showing connections between screens that can occur.
The hi-fi prototypes below are separated by workflow. The full Figma prototype can be found here.
This was my first experience taking a human-computer interaction course, and I learned a lot about the psychology behind many of the design elements I already knew about. I found a new interest in user experience research, and I hope to be able to incorporate more of it into my future projects.
