UX Case Study — Twitter: Personalized Bookmarks

Managing informations & inspiring tweets for later

https://trglv.com/relationship-marketing-using-twitter/

Like a bird, human can chirping to share information in today’s life (well, digitally).

Overview

Twitter has being a multifunctional text-based platform in social media. People on twitter today is not only seeking for updated information, catching up with friends or hobbies, but they do self disclosure by telling unspoken truth and even crowdfunding too!. However, due to rapid change in information on Twitter, sometimes it makes the user overwhelming and not feeling fun about the experience. Twitter has tackle the issue with bookmarks feature to save it for later, but it is still frustrating for those who saved lot of tweets for later:

User frustration

Seeing the status quo, I’d like to explore on how to optimize Twitter usability and satisfied the user as my first UX case study portfolio.

Disclaimer

This case study are made for my personal goals:

• To be more practical on design thinking process
• To get technical knowledge related to UX Design & UX Research documentation with Google Suites or Notion.
• To develop skills in using Figma, Miro and Maze.
• To complete my first UX Case Study

Empathize — Understanding The Problem

To get qualitative data about user problems and see their behavior while using the app particularly managing the information from Tweets or Threads*, I conduct in-depth interview with my four friends.

The interview questions are separated in 5 section (including ice breaking) and expected to be done in 30 minutes per person. (You can find the interview questions here)

The results of the interview were analyzed to be Empathy Map for each person.

Empathy Maps

Within the Empathy Maps I understand most users are loyal users from 2009–2010, the loyalty gave me information that Twitter has some kind of matching values with user for being relevant with the current trend/information & no need to be visually aesthetic for it so they can be their true self. However, their other purpose using Twitter is to be entertained or get tips n tricks about their interests.

*Threads is a series of connected Tweets from one person to provide more context, updated or an extended point (Twitter, 2021)

Discovery

My approach to define the problems are making user persona and affinity diagram, both are made based on empathy maps. The user persona help me to define main frustrations, needs and goals. The affinity diagram help me to discover insights related to managing information or new findings with deliverable action items by grouping observations.

User Persona for the Case Study

Affinity Diagram

Insights & Findings

• User doesn’t know how to use bookmarks feature
• User sometimes tend to like more intimacy & privacy in order to speak up their mind or self-disclosure

Action Items — (Potential Solutions)

• Provide clearer directions on how to bookmarks Tweet / Threads
• Categorizes saved Tweets or Threads based on interests
• To gave user option to personalize who can see the Tweet before posting

Ideation

First, I do benchmarking with other two tops mentioned by the user for social media which were Instagram and TikTok. The benchmarking observation was done to gain user visual similarity so our solution will not add more frustrations.

From the observation, Instagram and Tiktok has its own plus and minus from the add to favorites features ( — or bookmarks). Instagram provide clearer directions on how to add and where to see the added posts, also user can categorize it. Meanwhile, Tiktok provide clear on where to see the favorites post by showing the button on profile page.

Task-flow Twitter

Now:

• Bookmarking Tweets or Thread:
  Home → Interesting Tweet/Thread → Click More Menu → Click Bookmarks
• Categorize bookmarked Tweets or Thread:
  None
• Tweeting for private
  None

Proposed:

• Bookmarking Tweets or Thread:
  Home → Interesting Tweet/Thread → Click Bookmarks
• Searching bookmarked Tweets or Thread:
  Any Page → Hamburger Menu → Bookmarks → Add saved tweet to particular category → Choose any tweets related to category
• Tweeting for private
  Home/Notifications/Search Page → New Tweet → Typing Tweet → Choose Type of Privacy → Tweet

With the proposed task-flow, I did sketching with Crazy 8 Minutes Techniques which was to challenge my self to sketch 8 distinct ideas in 8 minutes. Heres the sketches:

Crazy 8 Minutes Sketching

Prototype

Once the sketches are done with the evaluation after the crazy 8 mins, I translate it to Figma as shown bellow:

1. Bookmarking Tweets

I decided to put bookmarking button on every tweet to gave clearer directions and recognizable by user to save tweets or threads for later.

2. Categorize Bookmarked Tweets

Categorizing bookmarked tweets are made to ease user managing their stocks of information based on their interest. All of raw bookmarked (uncategorized tweet) will be shown above the categorized. Moreover, user can sort the name of categorized tweets to ease user found the information later.

3. Tweet option for Flocks (more privacy and more intimacy)

When user are going to post a tweet, they had an option to post it for Everyone (default settings) or only their Flocks (group of birds — close friends). The tweet can only be seen and replied by their chosen Flocks.

You can run the prototype here (I recommend to test it via PC)

Usability Testing

In this case study, usability testing are conducted via Maze to get data clicks, heatmaps & feelings with all previous interviewees. I ask them to run the prototype and recommend them to use laptop/pc instead of smartphone. There are two main task for them:

1. Saving an information of a threads about cats and how to categorize the recent saved tweets.
2. Post a tweet only for close friends

The results are:

• All of them found it simpler to bookmark with 100% direct success
• Most of them found it easy on how to categorize the tweets with 60% direct success
• User suggest to be able directly categorizing the tweets on the home page by pressing the bookmarks button
• Most of them found it easy to make a private tweet only for their Flocks, but it seems like the design prototype aren’t quite work well on smartphone so there is 1 user gave up because they doesn’t found the Tweet button.

Conclusions and future iterations:

Even after conducted the research, it’ll need more iterations to improve usability, accessibility and see does it really solve user problems and satisfied them. From this case study, the future iterations were:

1. Further research and analysis on the usability of Flocks feature
2. Ideation to enhance categorizing tweets on bookmarks feature
3. Reevaluate and measure the effectiveness of the solution

Key Learnings

During the process of making my first UX Case Study as portfolio, I did some reflection as my key learnings for future improvements (yes, indeed there are lot of room of improvements). The key learnings:

• Should create proto-persona from market research to define who will be the target market of the features that I wanted to improve, also it’ll help me to define inclusion and exclusion criteria for user before conduct in-depth interview.
• Realizing that every UX research method that I want to use should be adjusted with the objective of the research, but the more analytical methods is used, the better the reasoning of a design will be.
• A lot of room of improvements especially in finishing the high-fidelity prototyping including Interaction Design.
• Challenge my self to implement scrum project management with Trello.

Reference

1. UX Designer: Digital Product Development by Luky Wiranda (Skill Academy)
2. Usability Testing Foundational by Diaz Nugraha (IGTv @gojekresearch)
3. Petunjuk Memulai UX dari Nol (Wasil @halodesigners)
4. Master Product Design: UX Research & UI Design by Rob (Udemy)
5. and lots of UX Case Studies out there