Hrishikesh - Find Your Ditto

Overview

Find Your Ditto is a peer support social computing startup, which facilitates support meet usp among student patients with similar chronic conditions . This startup was my client under the University of Michigan’s design clinic, where students offered services to startups around Ann Arbor over a period of one semester (about 12 weeks).  Find Your Ditto wanted to redesign their application, considering the needs of it’s users, and modifying their currently functional Beta . Their first version had served as the MVP for the first cohort of support meet ups. As a design consultant, I was part of a team of 4 design students, and responsible for setting up and conducting various interviews and user tests to collect insights for the new design. Using the needs and concerns discovered in research phase as pointers ,we:

  • Reorganized the user flow
  • proposed the design for a new UI for the second beta for the application. 
  • Conduct informal user tests with potential users of this application, to validate our design decisions. 

The final deliverables were critiqued by 3a board of local designers and professors from University of Michigan, feedback from which was integrated before handing over to our client.

Goal

Find Your Ditto was a service designed to facilitate peer support groups among students with chronic conditions. Patients filled out details of their conditions and based on this information, demographics and vicinity to each other, they were paired up with each other to plan a meet up. Based in popular literature and common sentiment, the founders introduced anonymous messaging, and undisclosed contact details in their beta as a way of installing privacy and safety. They restricted the maximum number to people participating in a meeting to either 1-1 or a group of 3. The reason for which as explained by one of the founders, was that a small group allows a candid and intimate conversation. 
Our first goal was to validate the design decision that went in the first beta and propose changes if required. We conducted user interviews and usability test on their first beta to learn feedback from users for the same.
Next, we had to propose a new UI design based on our insights from the research phase for their second beta. 

Discovery

The discovery phase was conducted with the mail objective to collect insights from users regarding mainly following aspects of this social computing system:
  1. Anonymity
  1. Group Size
  1. Interaction
  1. Information seeking behavior

The whole process involved two methods of discovery

User Interviews

We interviewed 8 participants in total. They had been users in the first beta run of the application. Our protocol was based off the notes provided by our client from their pre-launch interview. The goal was to learn more about their experience during the meet-ups, problems they faced and things they really enjoyed in the overall experience with Find Your Ditto. Our interviews went in detail with how the users went about talking to the people they met up with and their thoughts on the same. If they had done a similar kind of meet up before, we asked them to compare the two to know how the two were different.

Usability tests

The usability test was conducted testing users to perform following tasks:

  1. How easy/difficult is it for users to register to the system?
  • The first task involved creating an account as a user, registering user’s chronic conditions. The form allowed multiple and at max three conditions that the users could register for meet ups. 
  1. Can users schedule a meetup easily using the platform?
  • The users could pick one of the chronic conditions they registered for, and schedule a meet up by picking date, time and location for the meet up. 

 These tasks would validate most of the part that was expressed as complicated by our client and the users, and was helpful in answering these research questions:

  1. Do the users understand the purpose of this product?
  1. How usable is the account creation process for the user?
  1. How high is the learning curve of completing a certain task?
  1. What else do the users need in/from the profile feature of his/her profile?

Observing the users perform the tasks, we noted down interesting behavior observed. Having the users think out loud their tasks helped us understand and collect insights on: 
  1. What about this interface is hard to understand?
  1. How can we make this feature more intuitive?

Insights

Based on the the key discovery methods, and performing our own competitive analysis on the products, we could summarize following insights that could be expressed as the key design prompts for our design decisions. 
  1. The signup process was too long and unintuitive
  • Initially, the signup process happened in such a way that along with having users to register for the platform, they would immediately be directed at the set-a-meet-up page. For users who were completely new to the concept and just exploring (or lurkers) this was a move to catch them off guard. 
  1. Need more personalized info
  • Users expressed a need to find more information outside of organizing meet-ups. They mentioned about their habit of searching the internet for information about their chronic condition and other problems. 
  1. Flexible on group size
  • The experience and the intimacy of the group setting varies for different users and different chronic conditions. Due to this, a lot of participants had different opinions on the size of groups. Some preferred a large group to get a wider range of opinion on things, while some preferred smaller groups to continue as a small support group that could share private details of their lives.