Overview
Anyone is an audio-based marketplace for professionals to monetize their expertise by sharing knowledge with likeminded people. With the rise of the audio economy, it's important that we design an approachable experience that eliminates social anxiety and provides security.
Anyone featured in Business Insider, named as one of the 19 Media startups to watch in 2021 alongside Substack & Clubhouse.
Final Prototype
Table of Contents
Timeline + Role
Product
Role
Timeline
Research & Ideation
Prototyping & Testing
Communication
UX Research: Product Audit | Affinity Map
Product Audit
To frame any problems with the product, we began by auditing the existing mobile application with a customer journey map of the explore and call interface.
Affinity Diagram
After analyzing the product and user flow, we created an affinity map to organize our insights. This allowed us to identify pain points, potential frustrations, and where improvement is most essential.
North Star Metric
Our product audit and affinity map gave us confidence to form problem statements and How Might We questions that we used to shape our NSM. This allowed us to understand where to place our focus as well as set initiatives we need to design to reach our destination.
We've set our NSM to ensure that the iterations that we're making are actively navigating towards maximizing engagement by improving the user experience. By focusing on existing pain points we are able to enable users to take greater, more confident action while mitigating social anxiety in users. By prioritizing users first, revenue by design follows. After forming our How Might We questions, we were then able to set initiatives of the steps we were going to take in order to navigate our NSM. The three initiatives we formed are:
- Establishing Trust: Implement Video Introductions
Allowing professionals to introduce themselves via video gives opportunity to present who they are in terms of personality, tone, and values. This feature establishes trust as designing transparency is essential for users to view and compare which advisor suites their needs best.
2. Security and Reliability: Favourite Advisors
By allowing users to favourite advisors, they're able to build micro networks. This initiative can encourage callbacks and create authentic bonds as users are able to save profiles of those they know they can trust and rely on.
3. Active Feedback and Documentation
As an audio-based app, it's important to ensure users are getting what they pay for — time, information, and documentation.
Problem Statements
To frame the user frustrations in the product, we began by structuring the problems in the format: [situation], [response], [problem to business or experience] to ensure that we're aware of users and business needs.
Assumptions & Observations
When in need of an immediate response, users are required to explore and compare which advisors would suite their needs best, which causes frustration as there may be too many options to choose from.
When skimming through profiles, users are required to read through each description to get a better idea of who advisors are which is time consuming and doesn't offer enough information for users to trust and gain a sense of reliability.
When selecting a topic of discussion, users are limited to information of advisors background, which causes distrust as users require more information to know whose time is worth paying for — "can this advisor give me the answers I need for this specific topic?"
When making a call, users are required to pay then wait for advisors to pick up, which causes anxiety because there's no indication to know if advisors will answer the call.
How Might We reach our NSM?
By putting ourselves in users shoes, we were able to further understand the pain points experienced. This really helped us draft the right questions to ask to get the ball rolling.
Ethnography Research: Observations
Since we has a strict time restriction and limited resources, we were not able to interview users in different environments. We assumed that because people are paying for this service, they would place themselves in an environment where noise is low so the sound quality of the call would be clear and no information would be missed. We asked founders, entrepreneurs, and freelancers that we recruited on LinkedIn and Slack to record themselves while they made calls.
For privacy and security reasons, I am not be able to share any recordings.
Key Findings
- Users take physical notes with either a pen and paper or on their notes app
- The time limitation brings both excitement and stress (due to fear of missing information)
- Responsive to advisors, conversational instead of lecture
Identified Existing Frustrations
- Advisors don't always answer calls.
- There is no way to identify whether advisors are aware of incoming interactions.
- Users multitasking and bad connection may lead to missed information and awkward silences
- Too much information to note in one sitting may lead to missed information
User Journey
After understanding where pain points lie—we made a user flow that allowed us to easily digest interactions and the system of the product. We then looked into the details to determine what could be decreased and simplified.
Storyboard: Perspective is Key
Although we're only iterating the user flow of selecting an advisor and making a call, we believe that it's important to understand the scenario of when the service would be of use.
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Who are the Users?
With limited time and resources, we asked Sam Ducker for transcripts to help us research and identify patterns to create personas based on current users on the Anyone app. They are divided by user types — advisors (credible professionals) and entrepreneurs.
Breakdown of the User Journey
To visualize the problem and understand users, we mapped out a storyboard to visualize the user perspective of using the app.
1. Environment and Situation
2. Who Can I Rely On?
3. Making Contact
4. Call Overview
Ideation
Highlighted below displays the overall flow a user needs to take to make a call.
Current Screens
My team and I reviewed the each step of the flows — selection of advisor and outreach. At this stage, we identified what features and information are currently available to users. Taking a deeper dive made me realize that I, myself as a user and consumer, would require more information before paying to speak to anyone. My teammates felt the same.
After identifying opportunities of areas of where to build bridges, we conducted a Brainwriting session to further sync as a team and brainstorm ideas of what could work.
After generating ideas from each other and voting for which would be most impactful, we colour-coded the stickies based on the results.
- Dark Green → Most Votes
- Light Green → Possibilities to explore
To identify which ideas to prioritize, we added a red tags to identify which to go forward with.
Part One - Answering HMW questions
After discussing each sticky note and voting which idea we individually believed would work best, we went forward with grouping each idea by similarity then generating solutions for each row.
Initial Sketches: Selecting an Advisor (Jhoza & Ian)
Considering that the service isn't free, it's important that we design an experience where all users can easily get to know advisors. I took inspiration from social apps such as Instagram and Hinge because of how effectively they present profiles and lead users to learn more about other people.
Explore Page
- Favourites: Snippet of introductions from advisors that users added to their network
- Popular Questions: The algorithm could serve users with relevant questions that are most asked by others and showcase the advisors who are available to connect right away.
- Featured: Users could easily get to know advisors by clicking on their picture to view their introduction/story video.
View Story
People value transparency. It's crucial to give advisors a platform to introduce themselves as one would in person. This video could be a snippet of the full introduction that advisors have on their profiles. It is an accessible, quick and easy option for users to get a sense of who advisors are as a person — personality, tone, and values.
Favourites Page
One thing dating apps do really well is organization. Users can easily access the advisors they know they trust and view people they are interested in connecting with. This could increase callback and encourage users to make new connections.
Advisor Profile
The advisor profiles highlight the full introduction video along with a bio elaborating on their current job description and projects. There are tabs where users can easily explore more information about advisors. I specifically used tabs to separate information to make sure it's easy to differentiate what information was published by who.
Personal Achievements
This page is where advisors could display any awards received, job history, and other experiences they wish to highlight. I considered adding an extension to LinkedIn but I wanted to avoid leading users to leave the app.
User Reviews
The review titles are of the set questions that advisors offer. This way users can gain clarity of whether a specific advisor can give a quality answer to the question they want to ask/meets their standards.
Part Two - Answering HMW questions
After discussing each sticky note and voting which idea we individually believed would work best, we went forward with grouping each idea by similarity then generating solutions for each row.
Initial Sketches: Making a Call (Sandy & Caitlyn)
Sandy & Caitlyn focused on creating an easeful call experience to decrease anxiety within callers. They sketched solutions of what/how the Anyone app could visually communicate how much time has passed, what actions users have while being on a call, and the abilities users have after completing a call.
Final Screens
UI Kit - Interface Elements
To ensure our redesign aligned with Anyone’s brand, we integrated elements of the existing style. After inspecting and analyzing our data, we designed a high-fidelity prototype in accordance with the problems we’re determined to solve.
Styles & Components
By creating a design system, we were able to quickly design our prototype from mid to high within two weeks. This saved us time and ensured consistency across our team. All members equally contributed into building our system and frequently touched based on what changes each sub-team made.
Key Lessons Learned
- Working on Anyone taught me how to work and communicate with a sub group within an already small team. I learned that meetings are not enough within notes.
- Without full comprehensive research, you can still validate decisions through critical analysis and quick validation by quickly reaching out to others online.
- Touch base frequently — ideally twice a day during design sprints (depending on timeframe)
Summarize meetings to document decisions — who, what, why, by/when, and how