Whiteboard Exercise_1: Virtual Event

Design a product to help people socialize through virtual events during shelter-in-place.

For this write-up, I’m going to record the process and conversation between the interviewee (Jessie) and interviewer (Qi).

1. Understand the challenge.

Interviewer: A lot of people feel lonely during COVID-19. Due to shelter-in-place, we can’t go out to meet people. Normally, we can join events and make new friends. However, being isolated makes social hard. Can you design a product that could help people find virtual events to socialize with each other?

List of questions and answers I asked to clarify the prompt:

• Q: What are the problems? A: Right now people cannot go out to socialize with others. People feel lonely and boring due to a lack of interactions with others. However, there is no means for them to find virtual events they could join to meet other people.
• Q: What is the goal of this product? A: To help people find new friends through virtual events. Engage people of shared interests together. Reduce the feeling of loneliness during SIP. Help people to relax.
• Q: What kind of events? A: Events like watching a movie together, virtual singing, virtual board games, etc. People should be able to see each other’s faces.
• Q: What format of virtual events? A: I’m thinking of events held through Zoom.
• Q: Do you have any constraints? A: I want to be able to ship it in about a month.

2. Understand the context.

After getting an overview of the problem, I asked more questions regarding the users and their context.

• Q: What kind of users are you thinking about? A: Anyone who wants to meet new people and feel lonely.
• Q: Can I assume that the main users of this product will be younger generations, who have their daily job and like to attend events in their free time? A: Yes you can.
• Q: What kind of context do you think they are going to want to join a virtual event? A: For example, after a whole day of working, they might want to play a game with someone, so they could use this product to find virtual game events. Or they might use the product to browse for events and choose ones they are interested in. Additionally, users might create a new virtual event and ask people to join

After this conversation, I got a deeper understanding of the problem scope and user scenarios. I defined three main user purposes for the design:

Overall goal: make new friends by joining virtual events.

• Search/find a virtual event
• Browse all events and find one to join
• Create a new event

To further clarify the problem and come up with a solution, I asked more questions:

• Q: How long do you think an event should be? A: That depends on the event type. I’m thinking they should range from 30 minutes to 2 hours.
• Q: Should we set a participant number limit? A: That’s a good idea. I think we should limit the total number of participants to ensure the conversation and interaction quality. But I’m not sure which number to decide.

In terms of the devices, I think both desktop and mobile should work. The desktop will give users a better event experience because the screen size is larger, and more activities are possible. However, some users might not have webcams on their desktops so we should also provide a mobile version.

• Q: What kind of device do you think we should design for? I’m assuming that both web and mobile should be supported. A: I agree, for MVP, let’s design the web version first.

3. Storyboard (user steps)

There are actually two types of users: new users and returning users. I’m going to write the steps for a new user.

• Onboarding
• View list of events
• Search, choose or create an event
• Enter the event start page
• Redirect to Zoom page
• Return event end page

Each of the above steps could be expanded to substeps for a complete story. I will add more details when sketching out the design.

4. Sketch

Interviewer: Due to the time limit, can we sketch out the events page first? You can assume that the onboarding is done.

For the event page, users should be able to browse, search, and create events. Making and socializing with friends is highly personalized — users are more willing to find people who share the same interests with them — so a personalized “recommended events” will be helpful for the users.

When users log in to the website, they might want to join an event as soon as possible. So a section for “upcoming events” will also be helpful.

Besides the above two specialized sections, the website should list all events to the users. In order for easier search, a filter system of category chips should also be added. Users should also be able to sort the events.

Finally, to support all the functionalities, I added a search bar and a “create” button on the top.

Sketches by InVision Freehand

Since the virtual event is happening over Zoom, the event start page could have a very simple design with the event name, intro, attendees, and a button to join. The event ending page could be as equally simple as the start page.

Interviewer: What if there are bad or no-show attendees? How do you design a way to reduce or prevent the issue?

In order to address the above question, I think I could add an evaluation system after the game ends. Maybe each user could have a chance to rate each participant. If the rating is not 5 stars, the system will prompt a comment window for the user to write a private message to that participant.

5. Summarization & evaluation

Interviewer: How would you improve the design if we found both the new signup rate and user retention rate are low.

In order to improve the design, the most important thing is to understand the reason for the low rates. So I think I will work with UX researchers to come up with a research plan. Some research methods I could think about is user interview, usability testing, diary study, etc.

Furthermore, in order to get more user feedback, adding a “feedback” button on the website will be helpful as well. We could also ask users for evaluation and feedback after attending each event (so besides evaluating participants, the system will also ask users to rate the experience).

Interviewer: What would you do differently for some designs?

I think I will reconsider the participant evaluation system. Evaluating each other using stars might be too “rude and harsh”, and might introduce negative feedback between users. Maybe we could use a more positive-oriented evaluation — for example, ask users to select some characteristics for other participants, like “humorous”, “talkative”, “friendly”, etc. — and we could show key characteristics under each user’s profile to help them find similar people.

On the event list page, the “upcoming events” might be redundant to sorting events by time. Since we came up with the idea of user characteristics evaluation, I think it might be useful to change this section to “meet people like you”, and show events that attended by participants similar to the user.

Interviewer: How do you measure the success and effectiveness of the product?

Overall, I will evaluate the number of signups, retention rate, abandon rate. In detail, I will evaluate the average events participation number, and compare it with the average events completion number. I will also compare the number of signups, and the number of active users. For each function, I will have more specific evaluations. For example, for search, I will evaluate search efficiency by calculating the avg number of search times before finding results.