Project Summary
My Role
Product designer, user researcher
I designed an app that helps users improve their professional speaking abilities by pairing them with accountability partners.
Skills
Figma, human-computer interaction, intervention study, system mapping, prototyping, usability testing, style tile
Overview
Young professionals, especially women and people of color, often lacks confidence in their professional speaking skills.
Through comparative research, intervention study and user interviews, we found that users respond the best to finding buddies to practice speech together (accountability partners).
Through the matching mechanism, we help users find the best accountability partners. Through the calendar and homepage interface, we help users organize and visualize their speech goals.
Problem Finding
Many current researchers explore the intersection between how a person’s identity (race, gender, and whether English is their first language) relates to a person’s speaking patterns. Both primary and secondary research indicates that speech is not indicative of a person’s intelligence or credibility; however, we live in a society that favors certain standards of speaking.
A female participant in our diary study said, “I'm conditioned to want to take less space in the room”; therefore, she “intentionally uses more filler words to appear less assertive.”
An African American participant in our study said he “always feels conscious” about his word choices, and he tries to "imitate my confident friends” - mostly white friends - in speaking.
I conducted a comparative study and found that the problem space has lots of opportunities, especially in terms of personalized features targeting minorities.
2x2 Grid from Our Comparative Study
Baseline Study: Understand Users' Baseline Behavior
I conducted a baseline study to learn about our target users' current speaking patterns.
For our baseline study, we sent two interview questions a day to our participants to which they would respond with a minute response.
Our team would proceed to listen to the recording, noting down the number of filler words and credibility undermining words in their response, as we wanted quantitative data that is easy to compare. Additionally, we would send a post-interview questionnaire to see if there was a correlation between the number of filler words/credibility words and external factors: stress, frequency of the problem.
Baseline study was used to set metrics to test our app performance.
Ideation
Through our base-line study, we created two personas: Stressed-Out Sally and Approachable Amy.
While Sally’s usage of filler words and credibility undermining words stem from her nerves and lack of self-confidence when giving formal speeches, Amy utilizes filler words and hedges her speech in order to seem more approachable and welcoming to the audience.
We decided to focus on Sally, as she has the willingness to change her behavior:
Intervention Study: Accountability Partner vs Plant-based Therapy
As a group, we chose our two interventions during a brainstorming session: accountability partners and plant-mediated therapy.
Product Choice 1: Accountability Partner + Practice
Product Choice 2: Plant-Based Therapy
Mapping
Over the course of this project, I did several mapping exercises:
- Story Map: Helped the team identify the fluctuation of emotion of our users’ experience with using fillers, what features can accommodate a specific emotion.
- Bubble Map: Allowed us to explore subcomponents and additional features that can help our users achieve the ultimate goal of gaining more confidence in speech (e.g. learning goals, expected commitment, etc.).
- System Path Diagram: Allowed us to design the app to accommodate different types of users (e.g. app setting is set to English as the default language, but we added a feature to change the language settings for users who want to practice speaking for other languages)
- System Map: Helped us identify the root causes of excessive use of fillers (e.g. stress, audience, perceived importance of speech) and the main goals that we should focus on (e.g. increasing user confidence, encouraging practice)
Assumption Testing
Front View of Final Product
Back View of Final Product
We proceeded to test assumptions in our intervention design, to ensure the effectiveness of our final product.
1. Having an accountability partner encourages users to practice more
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Question: How are accountability partners ranked in relation to other motivational factors of practicing speech?
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Hypothesis: Accountability partners will be ranked relatively high.
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Design: 1-on-1 interviews with participants to gain insight to their opinions on accountability partners
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Result: Participants need clarity on who the accountability partner is. They feel comfortable if the partners are their friends and will be motivated to practice. They do not prefer complete strangers.
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Moving forward: Design features that allow matches to get to know each other on a more personal level and gain friendship.
2. Users will be interested to download and use our app
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Question: Will an app advertisement encourage people to learn more about our app?
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Hypothesis: A few users would be interested in our app from our advertisement while some will scroll past through.
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Design: Users receive a NY Times article about fear of public speaking, with our app advertisement incorporated inside the article. Observe if users click on the ad.
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Result: Out of 2 users, 1 clicked on the ad. One user indicated that the ad was the main thing that caught their attention while reading the app, primarily because they were interested in the topic of improving speech. The other user scrolled past because they dislike seeing ads in general and are not interested in improving speech.
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Moving forward: This assumption testing made us aware that not all users will be interested in our app; hence, we need to strategize the design of our app to fit a narrow target audience of users who intend to improve speech rather than creating a general matchmaking app.
Wireflow Prototyping
We made wireflows for our four main features – onboarding, swiping, messaging, and calendar. The wireflows also helped us realize and clarify that our app has two main functions: the first is to help users build connections with others with like-minded goals through the swiping and matching interface; the second is to help users improve their speech abilities through the calendar interface and “speech games” feature in messaging interface.
Moodboard and Style Tiles
From the moodboard, we decided that we want to convey the feeling of young, fun and professional in our app. Speech practice has always been viewed as boring and we hope our app can change that perception.
Final Style Tile
Sketchy Screens
We included the features of onboarding, swiping and messaging for our sketchy screens. We adopted simplistic and intuitive designs and interfaces that users are familiar with.
Clickable Screens
We implemented our clickable prototype with three flows: onboarding, swiping, messaging.
Usability Testing
In our user test, we gave the users tasks to interact with all individual flows we implemented. We asked questions on the aspects of design that we were unsure of, such as “to what extent do you think the swiping page gave you enough information to make the decision to swipe?” Some of the example modules of interaction are as following:
Synthesizing feedback from user testing, we pin-pointed three main issues to fix.
1. Unclear purpose of application
For an application that focuses on improving speech through practice; the prototype currently focuses on the matching part of the application, leaving a lot of the users confused on how the algorithm works as a matching algorithm. We need to put more emphasis on the action items of speech improvement. Next steps:
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To match with someone, someone sends prompts instead of a simple messaging feature.
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Increase the focus of speech improvement on the homepage by listing out “next steps”
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Finish implementing the Calendar flow and the feature of “Scheduling a practice session” in chat
2. Unclear on what the user was signing up for
The user was often unclear on what he/she was ultimately signing up for. This was problematic, as the user could not be helped. Next steps:
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Integrate an illustration that helps illustrate what the purpose of Talko
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Update the slogan on the first screen during onboarding to something that explains the app features more clearly
3. Incomplete flows leave users confused about what exactly happens on the app
Next steps:
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Make swiping page swipeable, and show the matching page
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Add pages that show example texts in the signup flow
Final Prototype
Incorporating feedback from useability testing, here are some example final screens I created:
