Project name Cloudy
This is an ongoing project which will be updated as it progresses.
Idea to Concept
We look at and use our phones quite a bit through the day, according to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s annual Internet Trends report (2013) we are doing a so called ”smartphone-out-of-the-pocket-loop” 150 times a day.
With this in mind, I was inspired by Golden Krishnas book The best interface is no interface (2015) when I came up with a new concept project. The book more or less centers around that the computer (or in this case more commonly known as your Smart phone) should do the work for you instead of you having to remove the phone from your pocket). Take Tinder as an example. Sure, the smartphone tells you that there are people in your vicinity that’s looking to be matched but the phone won’t help you with anything unless you stare at the screen and making an action (or more recently, get a bot that swipes right automatically on everyone which actually makes Tinder a normal dating service).
I thought about it in a broader perspective. Maybe you don’t want to meet a particular person. You may just want to hang out in areas that is normally populated with your kind of people. This is common knowledge in your home town. Maybe you are interested in something exotic like knitting and therefor you know in what stores and areas the people interested in knitting hangs out? Bike people with all their subcultures know where they might bump into their peers.
But what if you are new to a city or on a trip and want to hang out and discover places and areas people share your interests? Suddenly you may not be so sure anymore.
Here comes the pitch. What if the phone could tell you in what areas your peers hang out in any city. This would narrow down the search for people that share your interest. You would of course not see exactly where a person is (everyone with privacy concerns can now settle down) but what if many peers goes through the same area in a certain time, the cloud of that interest grows stronger. Also, by letting technology do most of the work we reduce the interaction cost by removing steps. All the user have to do to start is to select something like interests, hobbies or maybe sexual orientation and then, besides looking where other people are, start moving around and spreading the cloud as well.
This is a good way of making users actually use the product according to author of the book Hooked (2014) by Nir E Yal. Less steps to actually use the product will lead to higher ability to use the product which equals to more frequent use of the product. This must be the goal of every developer. This also goes hand in hand with Golden Krishnas reasoning of making the user work less.
There are many sites and apps that can help finding places you want to visit based on reviews. However, there is an old common fact within interaction design that advice that you should look what people actually do, not what they say they do. With reviews you will not get help knowing where the people actually hang out that shares your interests. Again, I also want to incorporate the idea that the user should not have to interact with the phone to show where you are (e.g. checking in).
The machinery to make Cloudy would not be something new. Google have used similar technology since 2004. That’s why they can show when there’s traffic jams or what times during the day that stores and restaurants are as most busy without any of the Google service users have to do anything. It is, in other words, highly feasible, to develop Cloudy.
Hooked inspired me to try and design cloudy based on it’s recipe. The point is to get the user “Addicted” in a non-manipulative way. The hook-model, which the book centers around, is based on 4 steps needed to make the user continue using the product. The four steps are Trigger, Action, reward and investment.
If you put cloudy into this framework:
A trigger is, according to Nir Eyal, something to remind you about the app (like an icon or notification). If the product gives off too many irrelevant notifications th user will start to discard them and maybe turn them off, or even worse, uninstall the app. If a notification only shows up when user is moving through a dense area of peers with same interests, it’s relevant and should make the user launch Cloudy.
The action, however small will be that the user checks out which peers are in this area.
This is also the reward. The user have reached an area where there are peers and it’s time to put the phone down. The phone will now notice that the user is in an area of interest and start making the cloud stronger.
The last stage of the cycle is the investment which also is known as the IKEA effect for some. The user have invested in the product by first adding it’s own interests and by adding to the cloud. The user would then want to invest in it’s cloud for the same reason that user-driven sites like Reddit, Quora or even Wikipedia work. It’s because of Digital Tribes. The basic idea is that Tribes that share interests want to help each other out. Nir E Yal talks about this in his book but you can dive into the reasoning at this article.
Concept to Action
I started out by sketching a story board. This is a handy and a convenient way of externalizing the idea which helps to see if any of my potential users are on board at all with this idea.
Nielsen Group goes with the old truth that only 5 users are necessary when testing a design. We are not at that stage yet but involving the users from the very beginning of the design cycle is never a bad idea and the very core of user-centered design.
I therefore went out to find my 5 users to see if the understood the concept, liked it and maybe could come up with some ideas for a future iteration. I was also hoping that the users find the role for such a product in their lives.
Just by asking around I was surprised to find that the concept was harder to grasp than I thought. Someone thought it was a mix of Tinder and finding friends on a map which is quite far from what I’m trying to come up with. But with that said, a lot of new ideas comes up from misunderstandings. For example I started thinking of new ways for the users to contact each other somehow or giving new kinds of recommendations.
The next step was to make a Lo-Fi prototype to try out the feeling of it. This concept started out as a minimalist idea of using your smartphone as something practical so there is not much content in there to try out. The Lo-Fi sketch have to serve as a kind of concept image instead. But the idea is visible at least. Clouds of interests hanging over certain geographical areas (in this case San Francisco, if you couldn’t make that out). In the picture I have 3 chosen interests (Biking, Fitness, and music). These are quite general interests but will of course the user will be able to filter it down to more narrow interests. The green dot is where the user is. The map itself should be either provided by Google or OpenStreetMaps with a grayish filter making it possible to see cloud-colors better without cluttering the map.
With the Lo-Fi done I started looking at making a more Hi-Fi solution but still as a sketch. This is where I started thinking about the users experience regarding on-boarding and interests-picking.
So, besides from the actual map I also drew the solution for that part.
I wanted the interest part to be quite simple and straightforward without long lists. I also wanted a smart way of categorizing the interests below one super-category. Let’s say the user click on “Cycling”, an under category shows up beside it and so on. The colors should be similar to main category but with a little bit different shape to differentiate from the head category. The user should also be able to search for an interest and then get straight to the under category. While I cracked this idea by myself it was strongly reinforced when I noticed Tumblr uses a similar solution to their onboarding page. In the example above the standard Hamburger icon is used to open a menu. As this seem to become less modern and with well used services like Spotify ditching it in favour of Tab bar in the iOS app I might as well go with it. According to Techcrunch users started using actual menu items 30% more after the switch. 
A small confirmation when an interested has been chosen might be in place.
Finally the map in a more Hi-Fi (absolutely not final) externalisation.
In the next steps I’m planning on making an MVP to try the idea out.
To be continued