Developing the community feature on Deckstr, an app for people who want to improve
on their professional and personal goals.
Problem: COVID-19 prevents people from getting the help they'd receive in group settings to help them through stressful periods of time.
Solution: Create a feature on Deckstr that provides avenues for support via the group so that users can maintain productivity in and outside of the workplace.
UI/UX Designer
5 Weeks
Figma, Typeform, Discord, Zoom
In order to develop a better understanding of the tech productivity space, I conducted a competitive analysis to get a better understanding of what the applications in the productivity space are currently tackling and how well or poorly they handle this problem space.
After conducting this research, we identified the the following ways applications in the tech space help users to complete their goals.
In order to differentiate ourselves from other applications in the productivity space, we wanted to focus more on how community spaces can foster accountability and develop a functional space on the application that users could use to help complete their goals rather than relying on gamification as many of the applications we reviewed did.
To further narrow down the problem space, we conducted four interviews over the course of a week to better understand what was causing people to lose focus at work and what methods they used to maintain focus to complete their goals. Each interview was conducted over Zoom over the course 1 - 1.5 hours and was recorded along with a note-taking being conducted by the interviewer. The following guideline of questions were used and interviewees were given space to give open-ended answers along with follow up questions being asked by the interviewer:
In order to better understand the data received from interviews, I first transcribed the interviews and extracted the parts of the interview that I thought was most intriguing. I grouped quotes from the interview into categories and categorized them into the following themes:
From the data, we concluded to create a feature on the application that puts a focus on building communities online that could act as a source of strength for workers struggling to maintain life among the stress that comes from being stuck inside. We wanted these communities to not only act as a source of strength but to also play as the "mentorship" role that most workers were looking for while struggling by providing places for people to voice their concerns, gain feedback, and learn from others.
I first did a round of piggyback prototyping to test several different types of forms of communication and which was most effective in creating a space where accountability and community could be fostered. I wanted to learn what type of social norms would develop using the different forms of communication available on Discord to test out which form of communication should be prioritized on our application.
Each tester was sent a quiz that helped sort them into different groups based on their personal and workplace goals. Then each person was placed into a different channels in a Discord community based on these results and given norms they had to followed based on which group they were a part of. Testers were given a week to interact in this community while me and an assistant monitored the space and took down notes. A follow-up survey was then given to each tester to complete right afterwards.
After completing the piggyback protoyping, the qualitative data we observed suggested to focus on voice and text forms of communication, and I developed medium-fi prototypes and wireframes using Figma that fit this criteria.
Low-fi Wireframes
Each screen was presented to members of the team building the application and the following feedback was provided:
Using this information, the following medium-fi prototypes were created.
Medium-Fi Wireflows
For these prototypes, wireframes along with user flows were created in order to showcase more clearly how the different forms of communication would function within the app. These were presented to the team leader and I was shortly afterwards given the go head to start building hi-fi prototypes of the applicaiton.
See the full prototype hereThe medium-fi prototypes were refined and InVision was used to create and interactive prototype that could be used by potential investors. Additionally, a gif was created to show all the functionalities of the application, including the new and innovative community features.
Here are clear steps that can be taken to improve the design of this app so that users have a better experience and are more likely to continue to use the app:
After making these changes, I would see how our current userbase would react to the changes and continue to do more testing to try and figure out any more problems users have that I could improve or any additional features that can be added to the app to improve it.
