Research
Findings
Semi-Structured User Interview
As the first step in the user research process, we conducted semi - structured interviews with 4 people, including some Ph.D students and a Software Engineer. We asked them about their daily routine, their interests, and their social lifestyle. Our research helped us better understand our users’ preference. The research revealed user motivation, pains and goals that we could use these to create provisional and polished personas in the next step.
Takeaway:
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All interviewees were 21-24
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They had difficulty opening up to new people, but they try to make connections with people
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They want to jump out of their comfort zone, but conflict with their introverted personality
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They don’t want to waste their youth working all the time
User Personas
After we conducted our User Research interviews, we found some common trends among all of our interviewees. We used the commonalities we found to create two different personas, who emulate our intended target audience and user group.
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Even though there were some similarities within our interviewees, we still wanted to make personas who are different from each other. This is because we did not want to appeal to just one specific type of individual, but we wanted to include others of different personalities, interests and backgrounds.
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Below you will see Naya and Andrew, our two personas. Both are newly graduated from college, however, they have completely different scenarios, goals, desires and pain points. We used all of the information in the personas to better understand our user group and cater towards their needs.
User Journey Map
A user journey map is a diagram to unpack our user’s experiences and emotions to determining which factors contribute to their willing for making friends towards their social engagement process.​​​​​​​
After defining our personas, we chose to create a typical Friday user journey map for one of them, her name is Naya.
The map walks through Naya’s daily life on Friday, starting in the morning when she starts her trip to her full-time jobs and ending in midnight when she finished her friends’ meeting. We track her feeling, thinking and doing to help us understand our persona’s experiences.
User Journey Map Takeaways
Through the user journey map, we were able to create a potential scenario of what our user may experience within a day and how they would interact with our app. This is so we are able to better understand and empathize with our user, and implement features that are useful. We can also identify any trends in behavior and see when they would best interact with our product.