Adding Short Form Audio Posts to MŌN
Spring 2022 – Client Project for GA Certificate Program
User Research and Content Design Lead
Community Research ~ Social Media Design
Origins and Objectives
MŌN (pronounced moan) is a sex-positive social audio app that launched on the premise of creating Clubhouse style rooms for people to talk about all things sex, relationships, and kink.
The next feature that the founder, Caleth, wanted to add would let users post a short audio recording, like an Instagram Story or TikTok, which they wanted to call MŌN memos.
While the audio rooms had promising responses, there was nothing for users to do in the app if there wasn’t a room actively happening. Caleth saw MŌN memos as a chance to increase engagement, community, and retention through user generated content.
To design this feature, Caleth connect with our General Assembly cohort, and five of us were assigned to work on this project as a two week sprint.
In a normal design environment, I think most of us would have done more to challenge the framing of this project. While it was clear how having content on the app that isn’t time locked would be a good experience for the users, the idea that story style audio posts would be the best kind of content for the sex social internet culture had not been researched or tested.
However, seeing as we only had two weeks, we decided instead to focus our research on understanding the values of both the MON community and the larger sex content community, and consider how we could incorporate and enshrine those values into the memo feature.
Researching in the Sex Content Space
Before we began, we realized that we were going to have to approach our research with two guiding principals in mind: consent and privacy.
Consent
At all times during the research process, we wanted to make sure that the participants were comfortable with what they were sharing. To that end, we started every exercise with a full outline of what we were doing and made sure that they understood they could skip any part of the exercises they weren’t comfortable with.
Privacy
When asking users about such a sensitive subject, we knew that we would need to be considerate of privacy. To accomplish this, we set out clear guidelines for participants to anonymize themselves, even before their data reached other members of the design team.
Research
Because we already knew the feature we would be designing from the outset, our research was less focused on finding and solving a user problem, and more about making sure that our design and implementation of that feature would best serve the users. We needed to understand the user both from a practical, and a social perspective, to make sure we were designing a memo feature with the needs of this specific community in mind.
Surveys
In-App Group
Interview
Comparative Analysis
Heuristic Evaluation
Once we had a list of the common features from audio and video posting in other apps, and a sense of the wants and needs of the community, we decided that the best way to move forward was by understanding when and how MŌN users would be using this feature. Through understanding their stories, we found key opportunities to put the user first in our designs.
After we compiled our competitor analysis, our group feedback, and our user journeys, we did a simple feature prioritization matrix to determine what was most important to focus on.
A/B Testing the Content Layout and Architecture
When we started the project, the founder presented us with an initial design mockup of how memos might be integrated. In his design, memos, rooms, and podcasts all existed as horizontal carousels on a single home screen. But as we were ideating, we realized it might be more intuitive for each type of content to have its own page.
We wanted to validate this assumption, so we made some quick mock ups and ran A/B tests with tasks geared towards understanding where the users thought the content to be. The results spoke for themselves. The multi-page approach was immediately more intuitive, and made users feel more confident.
Final Designs
Recording a Memo
We wanted to keep the memo creation process simple. Recordings stitch together, with intuitive options to delete a section and rerecord. Categories for metadata are simple and clearly labeled. Advanced Settings allow creators to control the way that other users can interact with their content.
Design Solutions:
- Dark background gives the feeling of a recording booth and privacy
- Background options allow for users to customize the feel of their content
- Explicit Content toggle keeps the community safe and add consent for more NSFW content
Viewing and Interacting with Memos
We took a “TikTok” full screen, vertical scroll approach to the presentation of the memos.One of our main challenges was addressing the lack of visual content to fill the screen- but expanding the user profile and adding a pulsing purple light behind actually helped us reconsider and hone in our design for the metadata and interactions below.
Design Solutions:
- By default, the memo is paused, so that the user can look at the metadata and consent to listening
- Audio replies, instead of text, prevent users from “hiding behind keyboard”
- Audio responses are limited to 30 seconds, to keep conversations focused
Content Strategy
In designing the three homepages, our primary goal was that the user should be able to clearly identify and differentiate the kind of content they are engaging with. To accomplish this, we designed each type of content to have its own unique card style and metadata presentation, while using similar content display structures to help the app feel cohesive.
Rooms remain the same as they are in the original design- large, dark, a sense of privacy, lots of information.
Memos maintain some of the key elements of rooms, but are smaller, more colorful, and focus on the user over the content.
Podcasts are more consistent with other podcast platforms, showing the podcast art, and clearly labeling the title and creator.
Secondary Screen Redesigns
Finally, we wanted to go back and redesign the pages that offered secondary function to support the in-app content. User generated content requires users to be able to find creators that they want to follow and see their profiles. The new search page incorporates all three types of content, as well as featured users, and can become a hub for discoverability on the app. And the new profile page gives users a chance to highlight their memos, content, and upcoming rooms.
Next Steps
One of the things we wanted to test, but didn’t have time for, is the effectiveness of the icons and language we used in the redesign. Since memos and rooms as features are not common primary functionality in social media apps, our choices were best guesses, pulled from UI Kits and analogous examples, but ultimately unvalidated.
We also want to reconsider and test the effectiveness of the language around audio replies. In a quick last minute usability test, we discovered that some folks struggle with the frequency of the word “Reply” on the page, when trying to reply to the original post. Ultimately, we decided that we didn’t have time to address the issue in our final designs, but we did share our findings with the team for future considerations.
Reflection
What a weird and wonderful project! We got to learn from so many interesting people, and it was a real challenge to approach research where interviews weren’t really an option. As such, we had to work to make sure every form of user data we could acquire was as rich as possible.
Additionally, the research synthesis threw us a real curveball. As we were piecing together some possible personas and thinking about problem statements, we realized that there wasn’t really a way for us to write a problem statement.
We already knew the feature we were designing for, so a problem statement wasn’t really an effective bridge between our users and our design. It didn’t really teach us anything important. Rather, the user journeys became that bridge for us, helping us understand where our designs could meet and serve the users.
At the end of the day, the problem statement, just like everything in the UX tool kit, is just that- a tool. If the tool doesn’t fit the job, use a different tool.
If you’d like to talk more about this case study, or chat about design, AI, and data, you can reach me at t.h.ponders@gmail.com.