Week 4: Sketching

The most important aspects of my product are the verified accounts to improve user safety when meeting strangers. Accountability is also essential, and my product will aim to help users maintain connections (or let them down gently) to reduce ghosting.

Gamification

We were asked to consider gamification as a concept to aid product engagement. Gamification is the process of including game mechanics in a product to leverage natural human desires (Valamis 2023). While gamification was helpful to think about, I don’t think I will actively pull it into my final product. The process was enjoyable, and I liked taking another look at what I know about my users. I also found figuring out what I could gamify very helpful, as it emphasised the most important parts of my product. However, adding gamification elements to a social product didn’t feel right, which I explored further in the Design Studio below.

One outcome I did like from this exercise was the idea of vouchers for the most engaged people in the community. Supposing a user engages with the community regularly. In that case, they will receive a ‘top contributor’ style badge or points they can convert into real-world vouchers, similar to supermarket points or Bristol Pounds (Hickey 2015)*. Vouchers for independent local companies would encourage people to keep the community alive and help them integrate with their new homes.

Design Studio

Kicking off my little design studio, I made a brief plan, which, while not extensive, helped me focus from the outset.

The two images above show a random mix of ideas that all fell under the design studio’s goals of verifying users and reducing ghosting. However, I should have planned better, as my sketches jumped between many random ways to solve the same problem. Such wild sketches could hinder a team setup. Next time, I will spend more time in the planning stage to give myself a more straightforward direction. When I think deeper about the problems I faced with the design studio, I realise I often have ideas pop into my head while I’m busy with something else. Until now, I have always finished the first idea as quickly as possible before jumping onto the new idea. But moving forward, I would like to employ a simple note-taking system to remember the new idea for later. I will experiment with blurting out all my ideas at the outset of the sketching session and off-the-cuff post-it notes during sketching. By keeping more detailed notes, I hope to make my sketching process less chaotic and minimise creative overwhelm (Danielle 2020).

Reflecting on the sketches, I quickly realised that gamifying ‘ghosting’ was missing the mark. Each version felt punitive or bullying in some way. When I flipped the same idea, encouraging people to connect rather than punishing them for ghosting very quickly felt more friendly. Going back over my initial sketches with a critical eye went well. Doing it immediately afterwards helped solidify my half-developed thoughts and feelings. Reflecting this way also helped me question my initial assumption that I would include extensive gamification. Changing my mind upon reflection aligns with Darlington and Osmond’s observation that critical reflection changes the way you think, so I’m glad I got to see my own progress in action (2010).

I needed to incorporate the process into the sign-up flow to make verified accounts the standard. This sign-up flow indicates stages where users will be asked to add personal information to prove their account is legitimate. Users will, however, be able to skip steps and add the information later. Their accounts will only be verified once they do. Taking this step ‘backwards’ to the user flow stage was great as it helped to clarify that account verification is not solvable in sexy UI designs but instead in the flow of information provided to the user. Making account verification the norm will make my artefact less prone to fake and potentially dangerous accounts.

Wireframes

I turned the verification flow into a single wireframe screen, drawing inspiration from the Lex app (2024). As there will be a lot of steps in the sign-up process, I need to make sure the user understands why the information is required and that they don’t suffer from cognitive overload (Davis 2011). Each piece of info will appear individually with a small explanation of why and what it’s for, plus information on how the data will be protected and how users can change it later.

The sign-up process leads to creating the user’s profile, which, most importantly, shows a verification stamp (or not). Users can still interact with each other and the app in general without one. This area is also one of the locations where the ‘connection encouragement/anti-ghosting’ can be found. As part of the user profile, it states the person’s interests and potential conversation starters, such as ‘I’d love to learn crochet’. A button will take the user to private messaging with a suggested sentence based on the user profile they were viewing. I will move on to iterating my initial ideas on the private messaging service and how to discourage ghosting.

As always, the user needs to be able to go back and edit things, so if they skip account verification in sign-up, then they can always go into their settings and update their information.

Next Steps

I enjoy sketching, especially when I can break an idea into its simplest parts, so I had fun with this task despite finding it challenging. Overall, it went well, and even when it didn’t, I learned where I was going wrong and how to reflect on my assumptions.

My next steps will be to focus on wireframing the internal private messaging function and how users will be encouraged to maintain connections. Before iterating further, I will also contact other students for feedback on my low-fidelity wireframes. Before I do that, I will do some research into mid-project user research, as I am not sure of what questions to ask beyond “Do you like it?”

*Unfortunately, the rise of cashless payments made Bristol Pounds less competitive, and the local currency was withdrawn from circulation in 2021 (BBC News 2021). You can, however, still buy commemorative notes and mugs from their legacy website!

References

BBC NEWS. 2021. ‘Bristol Pound to Be Withdrawn from Circulation in September’. BBC News, 4 Jul [online]. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-57694453 [accessed 27 Feb 2024].

DANIELLE, Morgan. 2020. ‘How to Identify and Overcome Creative Overwhelm’ [Medium]. Ascent Publication [online]. Available at: https://medium.com/the-ascent/how-to-identify-and-overcome-creative-overwhelm-a004ea12e9c1 [accessed 27 Feb 2024].

DARLINGTON, Yvonne and Jennifer OSMOND. 2010. ‘Reflective Analysis: Techniques for Facilitating Reflection’. Australian Social Work 58(1), 3–14.

DAVIS, Nathaniel. 2011. ‘Information Overload, Reloaded’. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 37(5), 45–9.

HICKEY, Shane. 2015. ‘The Innovators: The Bristol Pound Is Giving Sterling a Run for Its Money’. The Guardian, 7 Jun [online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/07/the-innovators-the-bristol-pound-is-giving-sterling-a-run-for-its-money [accessed 27 Feb 2024].

LEX. 2024. ‘Lex’. [online]. Available at: https://www.lex.lgbt/ [accessed 9 Feb 2024].

VALAMIS. 2023. ‘What Is Gamification? Examples and Best Practices in eLearning’. Valamis [online]. Available at: https://www.valamis.com/hub/gamification [accessed 27 Feb 2024].

German vocabulary of the week

Sketching – Skizze