Wallapp

Current Problem

In the current day and age we have come to experience an unique problem, too much information. Any social media app that you use, there is a never ending feed, including Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Very often people get lost in this never ending stream.

Wallapp is the solution to this very problem. Here, you can be assured you are always viewing only the latest news. And once you are up-to date, you can resume your everyday life.

User Research

At the beginning of this undertaking I started out by gathering information about people using Facebook. About who uses it, how they use it and why they use it.

The reason for focusing on Facebook as the main competitor as it boasts the most number of users and surveying them would give a more accurate idea about the general demographics and usage patterns of the people using it.

The Who

The majority of people who use it are in the age group of 18-44, this constitutes about 63% of the Facebook users, with almost an even split between men and women.

The How

Almost 93% of Facebook’s daily active users used it via mobile. (Facebook Full Year 2016 Operational Highlights stated 1.23 billion daily active users with about 1.15 billion of them accessing it on mobile). This is the main reason Wallapp is mobile first, to cater to the needs of the everyday person.

Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2016 Results | Facebook

The Why

The main question now is - Why do people use social media apps?

The top 5 reasons included:

• Keeping up with the latest news and current events
• See what is trending
• View entertaining posts
• Staying in touch with their friends
• Sharing photos or videos with others

What I observed was that people liked to stay up to date with the latest news and trends from people they follow or topics they like. They also wanted to stay in touch with their friends, find entertaining content, and share photos and videos (According to an estimate about 78% of the people using Facebook hardly or never shared their personal photos)

U.S. Facebook video and photo posting frequency 2016 | Statista

Global Facebook usage reasons 2015 | Statista

Data Analysis

I surveyed 15 people (through Qualtrics, several others in person) to understand the users this product was meant for and with whom I will be testing Wallapp. The findings from this survey aligned with the research I had done.

• The mean age of the users who used Facebook was 23 years old with the maximum being 27 and the minimum being 21.
• Daily active users constituted 86.7% of the people surveyed. - 80% of the people preferred using Facebook on the mobile app.
• The top reasons why they used Facebook was:
  • Keeping up with the latest news and current events
  • See what is trending
  • Seeing entertaining posts

Personas

I created the following personas to identify my target users, their goals and frustrations. This was based on my interaction with the users I surveyed and the data I had collected during my initial research.

Focus

Deciding what to focus on based on the surveys and past research.

Usability Testing

Usability testing was conducted with several users, preliminary tests were conducted early into the process to fix any issues in the low fidelity design and make sure the conceptual model of the app aligned with the users mental model. Final round of testing (validation) was conducted with 5 users, to determine how usable the prototype was (measured by System Usability Scale test) and also fix any flaws that might have been fixed in the previous iterations.

Test Questions

• How would you follow a topic that interests you?
• You would like to share a website that you visited recently and add a topic to it. How would you do it?
• View the comments of any article and try to view the comments made by your friends.
• Go to any topic/tag right from the home (“NOW”) page.
• You would like to follow your favorite celebrity how would you follow him/her?

After several iterations of testing with feedback from multiple users, the design was finalized. This resulted in reordering sections of the apps, providing granular controls to follow topics, adding a sort feature to the comments, providing a trending page for people who want to discover more stories and events.

Test Objectives (Questions asked post testing)

• Does it overcome some of the drawbacks of other social media apps?
• Would people like it if they could view only the latest news and trends?
• Figure out if the app’s layout confusing or familiar to the people using it.

Several people responded favorably to considering this app as an alternative, citing that the timeline having an end is a unique concept which would save them considerable time. They also responded favorably to the apps layout as all of them were users of social media apps that included Facebook and Reddit.

Design Process

Low Fidelity Design

This is a simple mockup done to establish the general layout and sections of the app. It follows the iOS Human Interface Guidelines, which includes always providing context to where the user is, following the typographic recommendations etc (emphasize important information, use built-in text styles whenever possible, make sure custom fonts are legible). It is inspired by the countless social media apps that exist right now, this will ensure that the users are already familiar with the overall layout and concept of the app.

Wallapp has a simple onboarding process that introduces the concept of the app to the user and guides them to personalize page where they can follow topics that interest them.

There is a single feed, NOW. Here, users can view the latest news on topics that interest them. Initially, this is populated by the topics that they chose on the personalize screen, they can customize this further by changing the topics that interest them.

• Users will encounter the end of the NOW timeline once they are caught up with all the news.
• There is an option to create posts where users can share anything they like, an article, a video or make a text post to share something to the world. By adding tags to their post; people who follow them and the related topic will find it in their feed.
• There is also the ability to sort comments on the posts, this will help people cut through the clutter when there are too many comments in the post. Comments could be sorted based on several criteria including, trending comments, popular comments, or comments by your friends.

Users can also follow anything you like. Be it a topic of a specific type that interests they like or a general topic which covers a lot of other topics.

• There exists granular controls in general topics where they add or remove the topics to their liking.
• Following people they like is also possible, be it their friends, a celebrity or their favorite podcast host.

Users can also view the topics that are currently trending but are not on their radar. This will help them discover more topics to follow.

Validation & Result

After completing the interactive prototype of the app, I conducted validation testing on 5 participants which included a list of tasks follow by a SUS questionnaire. The scores I obtained following the test were - 87.5, 82.5, 77.5, 77.5, 72.5, average: 80.

The overview of the score is as follows (from Interaction Design Foundation approved partner, Usability Geek)

• 80.3 or higher is an A. People love your site and will recommend it to their friends
• 68 or thereabouts gets you a C. You’re doing OK but could improve
• 51 or under gets you a big fat F. Make usability your priority now and fix this fast.

System Usability Scale | Usability Geek

Reflections

Several people responded favorably to the NOW feed having an end to it, and felt they would use an app which only provides what’s trending now.

During my initial survey, some of the answers to the question “What do you not like about Facebook?” included

• “Too much information”
• “That I keep wasting time on Facebook , all the time . Screw you Facebook”
• “It engages a lot and people end up wasting their time a lot.”

Wallapp addresses the issues listed by Facebook users by focusing on a single timeline and providing stories about what’s happening now.