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Overview

In a society that values small talk people can feel alone and disconnected. Hart to Harts developed a card game that facilitates deeper and more vulnerable conversations as a way for people to share and connect over storytelling.

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The Client

The Hart-to-Harts cards owner

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Project Goal

  • Designing a digital product that connects people through a voice recorded story.

  • Delivering a mid-fi prototype to our client to present to investors.

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Target Audience  

Lonely feeling users (age 25 - 40) who seek connections.

My Role
UX Designer, UX Researcher
 

Project

Team Project


Timeline
4 Weeks (2020)

Tools
Figma, InVision, Miro, Zoom,  Slack, G Suite, Xtensio, Trello

Problem Statement

Lonely people seeking connections, need a digital tool to share their recorded meaningful stories and engage in a safe space.

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How might we digitize an in-person experience of storytelling?

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Challenge

Original Hat-to-Harts cards

Research and Discovery

We started off with a comprehensive research phase where we conducted a competitive analysis, spoke to SMEs, and interviewed users.

Our goals were to understand:

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  • The niche market space

  • Why users are leveraging storytelling as a way of connecting with others?

  • Are users willing to be vulnerable on a digital platform?

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Research Findings

We noticed a gap in the market for a plattform that does both sharing deep stories and connecting people.

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"People often find themselves telling strangers things that they wouldn't talk to somebody close to, because there aren't repercussions."

                                                                                     Brandon, Subject Matter Expert

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Users need a break through the barrier of small talk.

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Trust and safe space is important within a circle of story sharing. 

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All users are hesitant about recording their own stories but are interested in listening to the stories of others.

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To open up, users need someone else to start first and maybe then they will follow.

Ideating

With our findings in mind, we started ideating and each of us came up with different solutions.

This was a part of my ideation before converging:

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Idea for creating safe space:  Have the option to share a story on the public or the private page.

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Letting the user decide in which format they want to share their story.

The New Challange

After sharing our findings with our client and showing her our ideations that contained alternatives besides voice recording, she still felt strongly that giving the user just the option to share their story via voice will be the best and was hesitant about moving to our offered ideations without exploring them further.

 

As a team, we decided that the first step would be to explore a solution close to the client’s original vision so we could test our assumptions of what the user needed. Then we could deliver a comprehensive list of recommendations backed by testing to get buy-in on any major directional shifts.

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The new challenge was, how might we create a solution that meet our client's vision while honoring the user's hesitations to record their own stories. 

Shifting Ideating and Converging

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"I need a supportive safe space in order to share stories and connect with others." 

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                                            -User Interview 

"I feel more inclined to share when I hear other stories first."

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                                             -User Interview

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Ease the toggling between listening to a story and sharing their own.

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"I need guidance on how to record audio that is worth listening to."

 

                                                           -User Interview

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Usability Testing & Iterating

We had multiple users complete the following main functions of the app:

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1. Listening to a story

2. Connecting with a storyteller and

3. Recording their own story.

 

The main insights were:

  • We overwhelmingly heard that users were more inclined to LISTEN rather than SHARE.

  • Users were unlikely to use this app to connect with others. If a story deeply resonate to them they may get connected with the storytellers more to give support.

  • Users want to be able to filter content so that what they listen to is curated to their interests

Reflections

  • There is a significant discrepancy between the user and the client's needs.

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  • Some additional user interviews and testings will help the client see the disconnect and feel more comfortable in exploring different solutions that frame the user and their needs as a focal point of the solution.

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  • Users need to create content in order to keep this app alive, however, users are more inclined to consume rather than create. For this app there is still need to explore how to nudge users to share their own stories. 

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  • We highly recommend exploring alternative solutions or additional features that would better meet the user where they are at.  

    • Guiding conversations like on Podcast

    • Giving the user different options of sharing in addition to audio recordings (i.e written stories).​

Client Testimonial

"Neda is an AMAZING UX Designer! She helped as part of a team with building a prototype for Hart to Harts. Her kind, calm, and thoughtful demeanor was extremely soothing during the process of building a complex prototype. Her design flow was spot-on with her comments and she has a great sense for how a consumer would use an app. I also appreciated how much she dug into knowing about Hart to Harts as a company, which really showed me that she cared not only about the product, but understanding the essence of it.

She'd make a great addition to any UX Designing team!"

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- Audrey Hart Phillips, Founder of Hart to Harts

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