Starting with Research

Trans and nonbinary individuals need:

1. Connection to community and a sense of belonging. Trans and nonbinary individuals are often excluded in LGBTQ+ communities and safe spaces, so they need a space of their own to feel accepted.

2. To be and feel safe. As minorities that face discrimination and harassment, the trans community needs a place where they feel safe enough to build connections, be vulnerable, and process the trauma that this may have caused.

3. Free and accessible resources that can educate them. There is a lack of gender education in the US, so resources that can help nonbinary and transgender people understand their identity and experiences are crucial.

Creating Our User Personas

Based off of our research, we came up with two user personas centered around the two main reasons we though people would want to use our app: to find community and to find resources related to being trans or nonbinary.

Ideating

To begin ideating, we started with rapid idea generation on our own. We gave ourselves ten minutes to come up with as many ideas as possible. Then we came back together as a group to share, discuss and build off of our initial ideas. After getting a sense of what others were thinking, we repeated the process, either to generate more ideas or make previous feature ideas more specific. Finally, we had over 40 ideas. We sifted through these ideas by asking ourselves this question:

What will have the biggest impact on our intended users while also being feasible to implement in just five weeks?

Based on our discussions, we ranked the top ideas (as seen on the left). We planned on creating a forum-like app that would have subgroups for smaller communities, resources for a variety of issues related to the trans and nonbinary experience, and special safety features that would ensure the users weren’t uncomfortable or unnecessarily outed. We also wanted to implement a “Message in a Bottle” feature that would enable users to write a message that is encouraging or allows them to release stressful emotions or events. These messages would be anonymously sent into the digital void where they are received by other users.

Receiving Our First Feedback

After all of this brainstorming, we met with Professor Nam-Ho to get some insight and feedback from him. His first thought was that we had too many must-have features. After explaining our ideas further, Nam-Ho asked us a game-changing question:

How is your app different than Reddit?

We didn’t have a good rationale for why our users couldn’t just be browsing r/transgender, so he gave us a nudge. He emphasized how much he liked the idea of the Message in a Bottle feature and said we should focus our attention there.

Switching Gears

With this feedback in mind, we knew we had to switch something up. We stumbled around, coming up with ways to potentially change our Reddit like forum, but I knew we needed to overhaul that whole idea, so I took a risk and proposed something to my group:

What if we removed the forum and focused on the Message in a Bottle feature?

I was met with some hesitation and questions, like how would users build community when the messages are anonymous and random? So we were back to the drawing board to solve this problem.

Out of nowhere, I was hit with an idea.

What if users could request to privately respond to a Message in a Bottle?

This would allow users to make one-on-one connections if they resonated with the Message in a Bottle and then chat about their shared experiences, interests, or feelings.

Creating User Personas & Storyboards

With these new ideas in mind, we began to draw out our ideas. We combined storyboarding and low-fidelity prototyping in order to show both how users could use the app as well as the particular screens and UIs that we expected. Each member of our group drew two different storyboards depicting two situations and user flows that may be encountered.

Finalizing a User Journey

After discussing all of our individual storyboards and sketches, we created a combined storyboard that included design ideas and features from all of our storyboards. We also outlined a user journey map with the typical flow of our app.

Moving to High Fidelity in Figma

User Testing

Through three rounds of User Testing, we were able to iron out some kinks throughout our designing and prototyping process.

Our Final Product: Searchue

A community for transgender and nonbinary individuals as they “develop color vision in a monochromatic world”

A Quick Demo!

Reflecting

Looking back on this project, I have a lot of thoughts and further ideas. To start, one thing that I’m proud of from this project is that it is very user-driven. We made sure to do lots of user research before hand, and continued to listen to our users throughout the process. Something that I learned from this project is how important it is to speak your mind. If I hadn’t spoken up after our first feedback session, we may not have shifted our focused and would have continued to flounder with our concept. Something that I wish I had spoken up about sooner is the UI, branding and color palette for the project. I think these areas definitely could have been improved, which is why I am currently working on refresh and rebranding.

Refresh & Rebrand

I revisited this project briefly to give it a visual refresh and rebrand the app. I chose to do this because I felt that the original color palette and feel of the app didn’t match the goals and theme overall. I chose to rebrand the app to be blue to match the Ocean theme and the concept of a “message in a bottle”. This color scheme also feels friendly and more inviting, since this app is meant for a vulnerable and minoritized audience. I also refreshed some of the UI to resemble a more familiar social media app. This will make users feel right at home in Searchue because it will feel familiar, like a social media feed.