Overview
The purpose of the Likemindedly app is to improve event organizing among friend groups. I joined the team in July 2020 as the primary product design stakeholder. Through rounds of research and design iteration, our small startup team has created a mobile app that is adaptable, easy to use and offers several unique features that streamline organization and keep everyone involved on the same page.
Role: User Experience Lead
Team Structure: Handed off designs to 4-person development team
Platform: Mobile Application
Timeframe: Project begun in July 2020 - development and updates ongoing
Website: www.likemindedly.com
Problem Area
Herding Cats
Think of the last time you tried to organize anything with more than four people. Did planning it go smoothly? Did everyone feel like their voice was heard? How did you communicate any last second changes? Wouldn’t it be great if the logistical hurdles to arranging hangouts would disappear and you could get to the fun part faster?
The premise of the Likemindedly app originated in the idea that organizing group activities is more difficult than it needs to be. In order to understand how to approach this problem area, we needed to learn more about how people organize currently and where trouble arises.
Initial Research
meeting our users
When identifying who would use this application, we focused on two user-types: Organizers and Invitees. This doesn’t mean that some people only organize events and others never do, rather that a user’s relationship to an event changes based on which role they are playing. There may be people who play one role more frequently than the other, but I found the most meaningful indicator of a person’s interests lay in whether they were organizing the event or were just invited to it.
To delve deeper into these user types, we conducted two rounds of qualitative interviews. First, to understand the context that our users were currently operating in, we asked people to describe how they organize events and which platforms they use.
With group messaging and email being so ubiquitously used, it was clear we’d be taking on some pretty entrenched incumbents. Fortunately, our interviewees were also more than happy to elaborate on the shortcomings of these platforms. In our second round of interviews, I honed in on our two distinct user types to learn about how they viewed their responsibilities when an activity is being organized.
From our discussions with these interview subjects, I also narrowed down three specific pain points that could be addressed.
Pain Point 1
Event Details EAsily get lost
Because text and email are not purpose-built for planning activities, there is no easy way to highlight important event details. Even the most organized planner’s best laid plans can quickly be swamped by unrelated chatter and cat memes, making it difficult to retrieve the important information when it’s needed. Our interview subjects frequently referred to having to spend time clarifying even the most basic event details such as time or place, a problem made doubly complex when details changed or new invitees were added.
Pain point #1 - Event details get lost in the shuffle
Pain Point 2
inefficient group decision-making
Interviewees expressed an urge to hear their invitees’ opinions while at the same time showing frustration at the slow nature of group decision making. One organizer referred to it as a diplomatic balance that is required to ensure their friends were feeling heard while still encouraging people to focus on actually making decisions. The resulting gridlock of ideas often leaves important decisions lingering until the last possible minute or not being made at all.
Pain point #2 - Trouble with group decision-making
Pain Point 3
accountability gap between user types
The final common complaint was about “flakey-ness”. Respondents described invitees who wouldn’t respond to until the last minute, who would show up late or miss events entirely, or who would fail to understand event details despite extra effort expended by the organizer to make things as clear as possible. All of these behaviors added extra stress and effort to the already complex task of arranging a social activity.
The wholly unsurprising corollary to this pain point among organizers was a desire among invitees to “keep their options open” and “not have to think about it too much and just show up”. This disparity in dedication to making an activity happen sometimes existed in the same individual, with organizers lamenting their flakey friends, then turning to talk about events they’d bailed on in the past. We human beings are certainly complex.
Pain Point #3 - Organizers look for commitment while invitees want to stay flexible
Design Principles
DEFINING THE APPROACH
In order to be sure that this product would address these key pain points, I set specific design objectives to act as guidelines during development.
Clear not Confounding - Information must be accessible and digestible at a glance. Know when specific details are required and when an overview is sufficient.
Collaborative not Chaotic - Encourage user interaction and make a space for all voices to be heard but do so in a structured fashion.
Fun not Formulaic - Don’t forget that planning activities with your friends should be fun! If there’s a hard line to draw with flakey friends, let the app be the bad guy, not the user.
After exploring multiple diverging concepts, I settled on a card-based organizational structure that would present general event details and get more specific and interactive as users moved further down the hierarchy. In an effort to avoid the chaos of standard group-texts and email chains, messaging was organized specifically to each card detail.
Solution
Product features
Event Summary Screen
Each event within the app keeps the most vital information — when, where and what, in an easy to find, simple to digest format. Compared to the chaos of a group text or email chain, details are easy to track and invitees can easily be informed of changes through alert statuses and notifications.
Survey Administration
To ease the pain of group decision-making, we implemented a survey feature that organizers could utilize to gather invitee feedback for certain event details. We looked at other polling platforms to make sure that our survey feature would be robust enough to handle whatever type of question an organizer might have. By adding survey features such as ranked choice voting and fully customizable response options, the app can meet any group-decision making challenge head on.
Initial Architecture
three-level architecture
First Prototype
flaws in the first attempt
Over the course of several prototype usability tests, we were able to verify that users could easily comprehend event details as they were laid out. Additionally, our event creation flows and systems for setting event details conformed well to testers’ expectations. A major problem arose, however, with the way messaging was structured and some of the collaborative features of our user experience.
In addition to the messaging format not conforming to testers’ mental models, feedback indicated that three levels of navigation felt excessive for the amount of information being shown. The three-level structure also hid two of our primary features, surveys and messaging, on the deepest levels of the app. I knew that I had to address this chaos and confusion quickly and directly!
Second Attempt
Two-level architecture
Winnowing down the three-level architecture to just two drastically improved users’ impressions of the apps navigability and greatly increased feature discoverability. In preliminary user testing sessions, the new interface has had zero issues with users understanding how messaging and surveys function.
Next Steps
Development of this app is ongoing and further iteration and research will certainly be necessary. Overcoming early flaws in the architecture and design of the app has set our team on a course to achieve our goals of making planning with friends easier and more collaborative.
At this time in early spring 2021, the world doesn’t yet need a functional way to bring friends together. However, when it’s safe to do so, Likemindedly will be ready to help users around the world collaborate with their friends to make those long-overdue get togethers happen.