Amigo
Client:
Amigo
Role:
UI/UX Designer
Date:
2022
Amigo is a project developed in collaboration with a cognitive scientist partner. It was envisioned as a friendship app that aims to deepen connections through a gamification-model experience.
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As the solo UX designer, I built a prototype early in the process as a stepping stone to our MVP that enabled us to do user testing, pitch to investors and get funding to build more robust features.
DISCOVERY PROCESS
For the qualitative research, we conducted 39 interviews with our target audience (age 24 to 46, US-based) to map out their struggles and define the key problems they had in the current social network platform experience. Here are the main takeaways:
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Friendship apps usually reproduce the "swipe through photos" experience of dating apps, leading to a superficial way to find and connect with people.
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Users dislike the shallowness of the current online social networks.
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They are interested in not only widening their social network, but making deeper connections.
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Initial small talks are repetitive and demotivating.
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Meeting people for the first time requires some form of ice breaking.
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OUR SOLUTIONS
Our concept was to challenge users to build deeper connections through an effort/reward approach in a gamification setting. Here's their journey:
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Users create their own quiz. They can select topics they care about, things they want to know about a possible friend, or just something playful and fun. The personal quiz also provides them a way to show off their personalities.
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The discovery dynamic is based on shared interests, with users choosing profiles to interact based on the subjects they want to engage with and chat about, rather than photos.
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Besides being a fun game, the quizzes also act as ice breakers in a more personal way, since users will already have subjects to interact later.
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Once a threshold of engagement is reached, more options and features appear for the users: they level up their friendships, motivating the users to keep the interaction.
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ITERATIONS
Our first concept was based on the already stablished photo swipe dynamic, with the addition of the quiz for a more personal and individual approach (Image A).​
After an initial user test, we got feedback that the mechanics were still very shallow and photo-based. The new version (Image B) was designed to highlight the quiz area and prevent the users photos from being hidden by the interactive box. We also tested a blurred photo version to introduce some teaser/reward gamification (Image C).
After more user tests, a usability problem came up. The users were confused about having both a "swipe left" mechanism to discard profiles, and the presence of buttons to play the quiz. So, I designed a "profile map" (Image D), but we realised that the main challenge we were trying to solve - the shallowness of the "photo menu"- was not being tackled.
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It was clear that the main appeal of the app was the personal quizzes, so I designed a "rolling cards"navigation homepage (Image E), where the first question is always visible and works as the main draw to start the interaction. Later, I also worked on improvements to the cards interface by stripping out unnecessary elements and shaping the information hierarchy by increasing the photos size, making the page more friendly and human (Image F).
