Product/UX

Days

2024

Social connectedness is increasingly recognized as a key factor in our longevity. It follows then, that we must put increased effort into ensuring that our social infrastructure truly serves us. Motivated by this, I wanted to explore the ways social media design could better nurture its user’s social needs.

The result of the project was Days, a proof-of-concept prototype of a social planning app.

Since its release, several social planning apps (Apple Invites and Partiful) have garnered widespread attention, validating the latent value of the idea, and how many of the principles discovered in this project hold true in the real world.

Details

Project type

Product/UX

Year

2024

Methods

Desktop research, netnography, survey, interviews, personas, participatory design, comparative analysis, journey mapping, sitemapping, task flows, wireframing, brainstorming, workshopping, prototyping, user testing

Typeface

Arizona Sans by ABC Dinamo

Icons

Phosphor by Helena Zhang and Tobias Fried

Mockups

Hinda Fahre + Doconomy

Stock photos

DeathToStock + Unsplash (Peter Hansen, Matt Gross, Pew Nguyen, Stephanie Tuohy, Sorin Basangeac.

Intro

Despite their potential to bring people together, the use of social media platforms has been linked to feelings of loneliness and isolation, particularly among adolescents and young adults. Today, these platforms are central in ongoing discussions around phone addiction and whether or not it should be defined as a clinical diagnosis.

The increasing focus on the phone as a problematic object, has resulted in an increased demand for solutions that address the negatives of current phone-related design.

The solutions span a spectrum of radicality. On one end of the spectrum we have solutions that for example monitor, limit or hinder screen time. These either add frustration and self-reflection to the user experience, or gamify willpower. These are mild interventions, because they do not directly address the addictive design patterns themselves. On the other end of the spectrum we have interventions such as dumb phones, which remove the user from the digital social ecosystem entirely, along with any benefit digital social platforms actually have. Few solutions lie in the middle, which begs the question: How might we minimize socially and mentally harmful impacts of social media platforsm while amplifying the inherent value of digital social networks?

Process

The process broadly followed the following steps:

Identifying user perspectives on how social media affects their mental health, and seeing if principles could be derived by looking at their responses through the lens of current literature on the topic.
Conducting 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—not just direct and indirect competitors.
Along with users, ideating on ways to address the uncovered negative patterns and features, and nurturing the positive ones.
Test solutions with a prototype, and iterate towards a final proof of concept.

Insights

I conducted surveys and interviews on the target user, which is determined by age and their negative attitudes towards smartphones and social media.

The shared attitude stems from different places—one from excessive use of technology, and one from inexperience and discomfort interacting with digital technology. In other words, while their attitudes are the same, they are divided behaviorally. This has implications for the interaction patterns used, generally calling for a more simple design solution to accommodate the technologically cautious user.

Furthermore, users generally had three broad use cases for social media use:

Communication: Chatting, sharing content in direct messages, video and voice chat
Information: Goal-oriented content consumption, to learn something specific
Entertainment: Consumption of content for fun.

What’s interesting is the attitudes the users held about each use case. People generally felt good about (1) the communicatory and (2) information-seeking aspects of social media. However after using it for (3) entertainment, they described feelings of emptiness, lack of control, and shame. Furthermore, using social media for entertainment was seen as the most addictive aspect of the platforms. Users tended to vividly describe the compulsion to scroll—being “sucked” towards what one user described as a “black hole” of content.

The negative feelings after using social media for entertainment is predicted by research on the topic, which identifies passive and impersonal interaction with social media as the least conducive to positive mental health outcomes (Burnell mfl. 2024) (Ryan mfl. 2017).

Taken together, it can seem like active social participation, while requiring more of the user, is ultimately regarded as a more social and rewarding experience than engaging in passive interaction. This outlines the core principle for the proof-of-concept: Design for warm and active interaction.

Focusing on social planning

Early interviews and survey results also revealed social planning features (chats, events) were regarded as a positive and social aspect of using social media, in contrast to content-driven features. Competitor analysis revealed that few similar products actually exist outside of the social planning features that are integrated into conventional social media platforms. While they are able to leverage the network effect to its fullest, there are two main problems with the current solutions:

The fact that these solutions exsist as part of a package deal with features that are not conducive to social health, makes the apps feel more like what one user described as “necessary evils”. Decoupling these features is thus inherently valuable.
None center planning as the core of the platform, so many opportunities are missed.

User journeys maps highlighted opportunities along the typical journey of social planning. The crux of the journey seemed to be the coordinating of people and settling time and place where people were available. This became the focus of my experience—to see if this part of the journey could be accomodated for by digital means.

1/2

After figuring out the direction I wanted to go, comparative assessments helped me determine the elements needed to make the complete experience the conventional way, not to copy elements directly, but to identify all the typical considerations that you are designing for, for example when you are dealing with a calendar.

After this i got to work on thumbnail sketches for different screens, lo-fi prototypes, and 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 once again drew on the ideas of Buley (2013) and Krug (2014), because their seminal works are easy to implement as the sole person on a project. I tested frequently and early, focusing on observation and post-test interviews. This approach should be sufficient to uncover the most critical usability issues.

Final
designs

Dashboard

The dashboard centers social planning completely, resulting in a lightweight app that promotes physical interaction by making social planning easier.

At the very top is a black section overlaying the iPhone notch. This is the profile section, and it is purposefully lightweight to avoid social comparison and profile focus, one of the main aspects of social media associated with negative mental health outcomes. Your profile only includes enough information to be useful navigation tool for others.

The top half of the dashboard focuses on immediately upcoming plans, with one prominent button allowing you to quickly add new plans.

Plans are separated into two broad categories. Loose Plans are indicated by dashed lines, and become Plans once a date and time is set, and people are invited.

Below is a list where chats exist. You can have chats going between individuals, in groups or as part of Plans. Therefore this section has them all intermingled, with plans being indicated by rounded squares, while individuals and groups are indicated by circles.

Combining Plans and planning

Another important consideration was the following: How can chat (where the planning happens) and the plan overview (where the plan lives) coexist? I discovered that current solutions often treat these separately, but it seems a worthy effort to attempt to find a closer relationship between these.

Early prototypes relied on AI, having events be auto-updated based on conversation. 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.

Casual but conscientious

Another problem with social planning is that it needs to be both casual and conscientious. It needs to strike the balance between the organic flow of conversation, and the systematic work that is outlining a plan.

Here, again, early prototypes relied on AI by having generated summaries of plan-relevant conversations readily available. But this came at the expense of user agency, something the target group valued heavily.

This proof of concept proposes the act of pinning as a non-intrusive way to save important messages. The Pin Board is readily available in the bottom right of the chat bar.

There is definitely space to explore this balance further. (further reading: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067246/the-unexpected-design-challenge-behind-slacks-new-threaded-conversations)

Inducing social connectedness

The heatmap calendar allows users to share availability subtly without sharing every detail of their schedule, and without the need for attention-grabbing design. Inspired by research concluding that even low-bandwidth, ambiguous design interventions are sufficient to effectively induce an immediate sense of social connectedness.

The heatmap displays overlapping schedules, and in the space between, moments of free time. This way users gain a sense of collective presence, while reducing the planning fatigue that arises when trying to find a good date and time for a plan. This feature not only reduces coordination effort but also enhances users’ awareness of each other’s lives, shifting the focus away from the clutter of planning and on to the fun you’re about to have.

Platform agnostic

Lastly, user flows were also created to accommodate non-users as much as possible, ensuring that non-users could stil participate in Plans. This is important to boost its usefulness and lower the barrier for adoption in an era of app-fatigue.

Learnings and reflections

This was a lot to balance on my own. I generally love to work in teams, so I hope there’s more of that in the future.
This project helped me discover parts of the vast online community committed to digital design. Special thanks to Maggie Appleton!