Social Media Application - Mobile
Like Us
“STRENGTHENIG RELATIONSHIPS THROUGH ENGAGEMENT & SHARED EXPERIENCES.”
LikeUs is a new social media platform where couples can discover unique social experiences. The motivation is to invoke deeper connections through fun, accessible, relationship-building activities.
Building Relationships
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Through Shared Experiences
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Building Relationships 〰️ Through Shared Experiences 〰️
STARTING FROM THE END - LikeUS BRand book
To get you excited, first, let's take a peek at the final deliverable. After months of hard work, our team produced an eye-capturing Brand Book that captures almost everything you would expect when creating a new identity from the ground up.
Project Information:
Title:
LikeUs Media
Client:
SideBench Studios
Vision:
The vision of a big-5 accounting firm executive, and his partner who loves creating novel ways to ignite passion, and maintain a "honeymoon feel". These ideas come from within, but at times they come from friends or viral content!
industry:
SOCIAL MEDIA / SOCIAL NETWORKING
Platform(s):
MOBILE APPLICATION
role:
Design Manager + 2 Design Resources (Branding, Research, UI/Graphic)
Duration:
6 Months (ONGOING)
Why this project?:
This project showcases how our product team worked hand-in-hand with our clients to develop a new brand identity. The work we did also helped our clients to articulate their vision better and streamline their product pitch as they progressed through MVP development.
Meet Our Team
Here's a snapshot of our product team. We are missing 2 designers here who would eventually be onboarded onto the team. Click the image (above) to learn more about our project kick-off process!
Working to better understand the startup’s vision
Early Kick-off Activities
We performed many activities as a group during the discovery phase, some of which I will outline in this document. One of them is called the “Headlines Exercise”. This activity starts with the end in mind, helping to craft a shared vision of our stakeholders' goals. It's fun to practice collective thinking, and to take the entire team 1-step closer to alignment.
Uniting stakeholders
Who should be involved from day 1?
While these activities where preparing us to refine the brand’s identity, these exercises were just as vital for stakeholders in other departments such as engineering, marketing, and content.
Titles & Tags are vital for marketing and content. This helps research domain availability, and SEO optimization opportunities earlier, rather than later.
Public Sentiment & Appeal around words, and their respective meanings can influence the way we interact with brands, just as color theory might play a role in a brands public appearance.
Product Requirements are not refined in this stage, but features and ideas begin to take root during early discussion. We did not require stakeholders to be involved in every meeting, but the initial few were to prepare us for what was to come down the line.
experienced Remote Operators
How the Pandemic still affects us, today.
While many companies are returning back to the office, many of us have adjusted to the new normal of working remotely. Depending upon who is reading this, this may, or may not be of relevance, but it’s important to know that you can hire a trustworthy team member who is respectful of dedicate hours, workload, and presentability when synchronizing with clients and colleagues.
Who are we Designing for?
Our clients were inspired to create this idea for themselves, and other mature couples when they found it difficult to find activities that aligned with what they both liked. In their mind, it was pretty obvious who should be using the application. “People like us”. But, before we could put this hypothesis to the test (which we will), we performed a few activities to further refine what it meant to be “LikeUs”.
Is there a problem worth solving?
It’s our job to find out.
But, this isn’t what our clients are paying us for. With an outline now created of who our potential customers might be, we moved to qualitative surveying. This may provide clarity into some unanswered questions such as (below):
Who’s interested in our product?
Is there a real problem worth solving?
What competitors are there?
What are their pain points?
How do demographics affect sentiment?
Our next set of responsibilities was to perform bespoke research into what certain communities felt about our product idea and synthesize this into a consumable report.
Interview insights
What we’re learning
We used UserFeel to perform our interviews. This is a product similar to SurveyMonkey. After creating a record of all audio and video interviews, along with surveys and feedback questionnaires, we were able to synthesize an internal report articulating are findings.
*Reminder: Every image is clickable
Mapping the User Experience
Once we were able to get some ideation from potential users, and the clients we began to map out what a potential user experience (that we could test) would look like. We performed activities such as mind-mapping, story-boarding, flow diagramming, and card sorting to adopt a more fluid understanding of how client requirements would align with customer experiences.
Asynchronous tasks
While we were working to map the foundational experience, on the other side of our workload, we were working to visualize how the product fits into the overall brand identity.
Competitors & Comparables
This actvity shows us what competitor products look like while letting stakeholders visualize UI styles that may be worth consideration/inspiration.
Color theory
Social psychology plays an important role in how customers view a brand. Our stakeholders conveyed to us terms such as skin, love, muted, passion, and organic.
We produced swathe groups of monotone, chromatic, analogous, with various colors that best describe the mood and feeling that a color produced upon viewing.
Logo & Sigil Development
For our logo, we focused on a few core characteristics that make our project stand out. We're a social media product for couples, that focuses on different forms of engagement, and most importantly inspiring strength, passion, and love.
I am not showing the end result, rather the horrific Figma mess it was just before we made it look nice :)
Wire-framing > UI Design
With brand guidelines in place, and core workflows defined, we can initiate sketching and wire-framing to convey concepts quickly. If approved we evolve a use-case to a higher level of fidelity (UI/Graphic) without delaying other more complex scenarios.
Wireframes
High-Fidelity Design
Usability Testing
We wanted to use this opportunity to get the prototype that we designed out to the public. The client wanted to build a lot into this MVP, but in an effort to assist in prioritization, we wanted to share the product with a few early-stage testers. This included internal employees and potential customers.
The end of our testing exercise helped us to produce a Qualitative Average Assessment Score (QAAS). This gave us a visual indication of which features users thought were intuitive on a scale of 1 (Easy) to 10 (Difficult). This doesn’t immediately change the trajectory of the product build, but it did inform all stakeholders involved how we should go forward with feature triage.
CONCLUSION
LikeUs brings a unique and exciting twist to the way we socialize with our partners. It's a mature evolution in social media usage, a reflection of our own personal growth during a relationship. We're still supporting the team as they continue fundraising into 2024!
