Projects
About
Student project
Digital product design
Visual identity
2024
Arizona Plus by ABC dinamo
IBM Plex Sans by Bold Monday
Overviewdays: an app for social planning
Initial research made me hone in on social media use. As of now, the design of social media platforms tend to prioritize retention over user well-being, something that is more apparent than ever among the user base. Some have tried leveraging this tension by creating apps and features that serve as band-aids, adding friction to the user experience, but few have seized the opportunity to reimagine digital social platforms.
For my investigation on the topic, I wanted to eke out the specific problems users perceive with regards to social media platforms, and see what role the design of these platforms could play in addressing the perceived problems.
The project entailed academic reading, netnographic inquiry, user interviews, surveys, design exploration, testing and prototyping, all within the classical double diamond design framework.
User research Surprisingly, we don’t want black holes in our pockets
My findings suggested that users generally separate the use cases for social media into three boxes:
- Communication (e.g. chatting, sharing content in direct messages, video and voice chat, reacting)
- information (e.g. active, goal-oriented content consumption)
- and entertainment (e.g. passive consumption of user generated content)
What’s interesting is the attitudes the users held about each use case. People generally felt good about (1) the communicatory aspects of social media. They also felt good about using it to seek out specific information (2). However after using it for (3) entertainment, their feelings take a negative shift towards emptiness, lack of control, and shame.
When interviewing users about their experiences with using social media platforms for entertainment, their experiences broadly mirrored those found in the surveys, but provided details not captured in the survey. I summed it up in the following key insight:
Surprisingly, we don’t want black holes in our pocket. For many users, there is a rather visceral compulsion to check one’s phone often, specifically to check social media for entertainment. One user described this as their phone being a “black hole.” That the phone is addictive (not in the clinical sense) is no accident; it’s the result of intentional design choices aimed at capturing and holding attention. Literature on the topic is quick to emphasize that phone usage is not inherently bad for everyone, but many users report that this cycle of compulsion feels negative, particularly when paired with exposure to others people’s highlights and easily-consumable content. This exposure fosters unhealthy social comparisons and passive interaction. Together, this culminates in a sense of emptiness, aligning with research showing that excessive, passive and impersonal use of social media is conducive to negative mental health outcomes (Burnell mfl. 2024) (Ryan mfl. 2017).
I made personas to sum up my understanding of the users. I found it useful to outline two different ones, because their behavior patterns are quite different, even though their attitudes and beliefs are similar.
Inflection point
Picking between
two angles
two angles
Research and user insights highlighted that while users appreciated communication and information-seeking aspects, they were dissatisfied with the entertainment-driven design patterns that left them feeling empty or anxious. This left me with two broad directions to go:
- Attempt to correct the fundamental issues of user-generated content and infinite algorithmic feeds, or
- Remove the content feed entirely in favor of a more focused social platform.
After ideating in both directions for about a week, I opted to remove the content feed entirely in favor of a focused social platform (option 2). While both options presented compelling opportunities, feedback consistently showed that users were most interested in tools facilitating real-world connections, not a reworking of content feeds. This narrower scope also increased the project’s feasibility within the given constraints.
It was at this point I determined that social planning (the planning of social events) should be the focus of the experience. Throughout the interviews, this was emphasized as a positive social aspect of using social media.
The problem
of social planning
of social planning
I pulled from interviews and desktop research to write up a case for the problems of social planning. In short, social planning can get messy.
Because of its non-formal nature, social planning is characterized by the lack of clear roles or hierarchy, and a lack of clear expectations regarding response time, response quality and individual responsibility. People organically take on different roles, and have different expectations towards each other.
Whats more, is that questions like what date and time to meet, where, and who brings what, can all get frustrating to keep track of in a conventional group chat or group page interface, where important messages can get lost between banter. There is opportunity for design to mediate this ambiguity. There are many tools that address some of these issues individually, but few, that I could find, combine them.
Since the solution has to contend with app-fatigue, competing products benefiting from the network effect, and the inherent complexity of social planning, an important design consideration was that you shouldn’t have to have the app. Inspiration can be drawn from concepts like graceful degradation by offering a similar experience to users with accounts and users without.
An example of someone who I think does this well is Kahoot, a quiz application where joining a quiz does not require downloading anything or registering with an account—though you are always welcome to. Lounge is another app discovered in this phase that plays with many of the same ideas, in the same context.
DesignScoping, ideating, prototyping and testing
The first round of refinements centered on outlining the specific functionality and page requirements, I...
- Conducted comparative assessments, as coined by Buley (2014), which is a fancy way of saying that I looked to similar products and features to determine common design patterns.
- Brainstormed to find new and unconventional ways of addressing the problems.
- Sketched out task flows, determining which features were necessary to complete common tasks related to social planning.
A task flow chart including different common tasks helped me get a feel for what screens to design, and the relationship between them.
After this i got to work on thumbnail sketches, lo-fi prototypes, hi-fi exploration. These are aspects that I find often influence each other greatly, so working on them in tandem is helpful to ensure cross-pollination.
for testing, I drew on the ideas of Buley (2013) and Krug (2014) . I tested frequently and early. Since frequent testing is the goal, it’s important to use tests that are easy to set up and execute. This approach should be sufficient to uncover the most critical usability issues.
Additionally, it’s crucial to continuously prioritize what is most important to test. Simply put, focus on the parts of the product that are essential to function seamlessly.
Key focuses of the design exploration was finding the relationship between event overviews and event-planning, and whether or not an ongoing chat could auto-update the event overviews in some way. Ideas varied in complexity, including solutions such as placing events "above" the chat as a pull-down curtain, using AI to summarize conversations and update events based on chat content, and simply allowing users to pin important messages. Diving into the weeds of the more complex ideas revealed issues that lacked elegant fixes, and users struggled with the prototypes, so the focus turned to making the event overview feel very quick to edit and tentative, and allowing for pinned messages—an approach that garnered better response.
In addition to navigation and chat/event integration, design exploration also covered areas such as onboarding, profiles, shared calendars, and notifications.
Key findings from user testing included:
- A curtain menu i designed got very positive feedback, and it became an engaging “aha”-moment for users
- Features like pinning messages were seen as valuable and an obvious addition to chat interfaces.
- Several rounds were needed to make a smooth flow for inviting people to events. This is an example of small interactions that have the potential to weigh down a user experience, and is both hard and important to get right.
- Motion design became important to make the relationship between screens and features within the app clearer. Prototypes without motion transitions were more often confusing than those with.
Branding
Identity
design
Identity
design
I opted for nurturing calmness, focus, and aligning with modern consumer tech-aesthetics while also signaling a conscious shift away from the very same aesthetic and its associated values.
The resulting name, days, references the calendar-based social app, and the logo, a 7 petaled flower, symbolizes the cycle of days, that make up weeks, that make up our lives. A supporting tagline “spend them together” pulls attention to the profound truth, apparent from the literature, that a good life, is a shared one.
Typographic choices were also value-based, with Arizona Mix by ABC Dinamo chosen for display type — at the time brand new, for its humanist, serifed but intensely modern look. IBM Plex was chosen for body and supporting type, for its readability and conceptual attempt at bridging human and computer through adding humanist touches to a geometric monospaced font.
Pastel colors and contrasting dark brown attempts to avoid color conventions in the field, and supporting aforementioned minimal, natural and calm aesthetics—all while remaining WCAG compliant.
The image style romanticizes the mundane through nostalgic grainy photography and muted colors. Overall the choices made mean to target young adult audiences, who are most ready to adopt new technologies, and most affected by excessive screen time.
Final
solution
Curtain navigation
The exploration tackled a crucial question about navigation: how can chat (where the planning lives) and the event overview (where the plan lives) functionality coexist in a more fluent way? Current common design solutions often seem to treat these separately, so instead of adhering strictly to traditional navigation paradigms, I explored different approaches tailored to users' needs.Early prototypes tested gesture-based navigation, having events be auto-edited based on conversation, or having AI-generated summaries of plan-relevant conversations.
User feedback, however, revealed the value of a "curtain navigation" relating chat-functionality with the broader context in which the chat took place. Refinements ensured this menu was intuitive and accessible.
Inducing social connectedness
One of the standout features is the shared calendar, designed to leverage ambient co-presence to foster social connectedness. By allowing users to share availability subtly and passively, the calendar creates a feeling of being socially "in sync." Through thoughtful visual cues—such as overlapping schedules and moments of free time highlighted—users gain a sense of collective presence without constant direct communication. This feature not only reduces coordination effort but also enhances users’ awareness of each other’s lives, making planning more natural and empathetic.Integrating borders
The dashboard serves as the central hub where users can view upcoming events, pending RSVPs, and relevant updates at a glance. Designed for efficiency, it employs a card-based layout to prioritize information, making it easy for users to act on key tasks without feeling overwhelmed. The dashboard also dynamically highlights new messages or changes to events. The black belt serves to visually separate the upcoming plans from the recent activity, while also housing filters and search. With todays phone sizes, moving interaction-heavy elements closer to the natural hand placement is good practice.Graceful degradation in Apple’s dynamic island
An extension of Apple’s dynamic island is proposed as a part of the design, made in such a way that it functions on all iOS devices with a notch. a
Outcomes and Evolution
User testing revealed strong engagement with pinned messages and the curtain-based navigation pattern. While certain areas, like event invitations, posed design challenges, the project laid a solid foundation for social planning.This project invited us to reimagine how people connect and plan in an era of digital-first interactions. It has been exciting to see how these ideas could evolve and inspire new solutions for the future of social coordination.
Learnings and
reflections from
this project
reflections from
this project
The importance of expectations in user experience
A lot of things dictate how users might engage with a product. One of them, often overlooked by UX professionals, is how the product is framed before use.
- The science behind the impact of expectations on reality
- The role of marketing and branding
It also ensures that the right users get exposed to the product in the first place.
- It allows a product to be appraised for the outcomes it produces, rather than the functions it has.
- It also has the potential to turn the product/service into an identity-marker one in which certain people will resonate with.
Social connectedness is a fleeting yet important and easy feeling to induce through visual design. It is healthy, and feels delightful to the user.
I cannot forgo mentioning the limitations of this project.
This is not rigorous science, but insights sufficient for narrowing the scope of the project. Still, the findings align with the literature on the topic, and the interviews provided the nuances needed to identify the different use cases for social media.
There is definitely space to find ways to reintroduce entertainment as a more productive part of social media use
days
Felles
Misc
Planters bevissthet
lordproctor@gmail.com
+47 952 49 507