User Research Report

User Research Report

Introduction

The world is full of people who have been friends for a long time, but when situations change they grow apart whether it be through differing interests, a lack of time, etc. Oftentimes the growing apart is not intentional or even wanted. Indeed there are times when people would like to continue retaining some sort of relationship. We want to provide them with a way to stay connected meaningfully for longer with minimum commitment. Setting out, we asked ourselves: How can we provide unique communities for friends through games, and bring new meaning into their relationships?

Since our main goal was to create ways for people to stay in touch, our target audience became long-time friends and friend groups that wanted to stay in touch. These are the people we thought could benefit most from a new way to connect, so we wanted their input on the matter.

Research Methods

The research methods we elected to use were surveys and semi-structured interviews. We chose surveys because they are relatively easy to fill out and can be sent to large amounts of people with little to no effort. On top of this, using a Google Questionnaire, we were able to track statistics on the data that we collected. This allowed us to get a feel for patterns among surveyors and arrive at a more informed conclusion. Interviewing candidates gave us a deeper understanding of how they feel about current social media/social games, complementing these with more quantitative information we got from the survey. We received 26 responses to our survey and interviewed 5 people, all but 1 falling under our criteria for target audience - All of them said they had friends they wanted to stay in contact with more often than they did. Our survey responses came from a mix of males and females, each of them being college-aged. Our interviewees were 40% female and 60% male, again all college-aged. Thus, we had a diverse data set in terms of sex, but not age. We had a wide variety in the number of times interview participants interacted with friends a week as well: From multiple times a day to 2-3 times a week. Overall, while we would have liked to have interviewed people from a broader range of age groups, our participants represented a pretty diverse group in relation to our problem space.

Findings (AEIOU Framework)

Digital activities that participants defined as meaningful interactions with friends were gaming, talking, and doing work together. Many participants said that just having a live conversation is enough for an interaction to be meaningful, whether it be digital or in-person. 50% of survey participants play video games, with some who used to but don’t anymore. One interviewee said that he “used to play Rocket League with [redacted], but not anymore. I miss it.” The digital environments that facilitated these activities were platforms like iMessage, Facetime, and group chats on social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, Zoom, and Discord. Survey responses indicate that people use their phones about 4 to 5 hours a day, and based on interview responses, a large portion of this use is communicating with friends. Every interviewee said they engaged in some sort of video call. Multiple said they used Discord or party chats while gaming, with one saying it was “the best way to interact with friends.” As referenced before, the interactions people defined as meaningful involved having a live conversation. Our survey measured how respondents preferred to interact with each other. One finding was that 50% of the respondents preferred synchronous games vs 12% preferring asynchronous games (38% had no preference). With synchronous games, users can talk to each other while playing, but asynchronous games don’t provide this. Objects that built the environments for the participants were calling features, often combined with an additional activity that all parties could engage in. Participants stated that mobile phones were their platform for interacting with online communities because of “texting, calling, and quick social media access.” One key element found in our interviews was communicating with friends via call rather than text. Participants stated that they felt a more meaningful connection with their friends when they could hear them and had the regular flow of conversation. In texting, there are long delays between responses and messaging doesn’t have the non-verbal cues of a voice call. One characteristic that seemed persistent throughout the platforms used by our participants was that they were almost too engaging. When asked “What gripes do you have with current social apps (games, Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.)?” we had ~70% indicate that these apps waste too much time or are too much of a time commitment. We found that users of these platforms were students wanting to connect with each other online. After our survey and user interviews, we have narrowed down the target audience to friend groups that want to stay connected using gaming. One finding of the survey is that ~40% of participants indicated they want to spend an average of 2 more hours per week interacting with people outside of school/work. ~20% indicated FOMO and another 20% indicated self-image issues. These two together show that people who want to spend more time together don’t want another social media app to commit time to.

Takeaways

The main takeaway that we got out of all of our research was that people often found themselves wanting more interaction with their friends. In our study, while people often found time for friends every day, people wanted more. A big part of this seems to be from the fact that people wanted to be able to spend time with a wider group of people but simply did not have the time to do so. One part of why this may be is because 50% of the people preferred to do synchronous activities. With work, school, and time spent with other friends, there simply was not enough time to spend with everyone (exacerbated by scheduling conflicts). Furthermore, even though another 50% of people preferred asynchronous activities (or had no preference) a lot of people found the existing social apps to require too much of a time commitment, not have enough privacy features, were too complicated/used dark patterns, or straight up created unwanted/unhealthy/toxic environments, resulting in them not wanting to continue using those apps. Another curious takeaway that we saw was that a lot of people also seemed to enjoy gaming and allocated a decent amount of time to this. 50% of the applicants spent at least an hour or more on gaming per day. From this, gaming seems to be something that people enjoy doing, but not something that they seem to be able to do with a large variety of people. Furthermore, even people who did not game spent a lot of time on their phones per day, particularly on social apps. Furthermore, in our interviews, we found that some people often played board games. This suggests that gaming plays a big role in a lot of these people’s lives. Due to how much people already spend gaming, we think that a game app could be the perfect medium through which we can help improve interactions among people. More specifically, we could design a game to help people interact with more people easily (making sure to keep in mind to make sure it solves as many of the gripes that people had as mentioned in the previous takeaway). One challenge that we can see occurring is that people overwhelmingly found the amount of time that social apps take to be negative. However, designing a game that provides meaningful interaction in a short period of time would be difficult. This is only further exacerbated by the fact that 50% of the people wanted synchronous games (meaning that scheduling issues would be at play once more).