Meetup Stories
Objective
To implement Story feature for Meetup app to drive user participation in meet-ups. To understand users interaction with meetup app and their motivation behind joining/attending any meet up.
My Role
Research, Prototyping, User Testing.
The Challenge
It is frustrating for the organisers when they plan a meet up but later they have to cancel due to low participation. In the members end, they often miss out the good meet-ups due to lack of good and persuasive communication. This project aim to bridge the gap and design solution to help organisers reach out to members in effective ways and members to get easily notified.
Process
Research
As part of the secondary research to understand the impact of meetup as a product, I tried to gather the statistics around the traffic across all the mediums, demographics, and top interests etc. through open sourced websites/ tools.
I came across several articles on pros and cons of meetup as a product and it's standing in the market.
As part of Primary research I interviewed 2 organisers and 3 product users or meetup members to understand their motivation and pain points while using the product. Being an user of the product, I documented every interaction with the product in form of a diary for 2 weeks.
The insights gathered from the research helped me to create the customer journey maps and personas.
Users
Persona
Customer Journey & Empathy Maps
Insights
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Members come to know about meetups primarily from notifications, online search i.e. Google, Facebook , Youtube, Twitter and Linkedin with Facebook feed being the prime source in social media.
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On an average, a meetup runs for 3 hours and people are likely join past the starting time if its interesting.
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Who else is coming is a big factor in attending a meetup.
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People feel left out when they decide not to go to a meetup but later see the pictures in the meetup group page.
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People rarely open the direct messages and comments in the group or they don't feel inclined to interact via the direct message or comments.
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Members find it irritating when the organiser is slow to reply.
Solution
After carefully considering all the data gathered during the research phase, I decided to go with implementing Story feature in meetup for the following reasons -
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The engagement of story features has performed better in Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook as compared to feed post, comments or emails as the users don't have to put much effort while interacting with it.
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As Stories disappear after a duration, users are more likely to open them and interact because of fear of missing out any information.
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As in the stories, the users can put limited amount of texts and the replies are simpler or smaller (select yes or no, slide the reaction meter), users are more likely to interact as compared to replying to a message, mail or comment.
Project Roadmap
High Fidelity Design
Interactions
User Testing
To test the feature and ask for feedback, I met tested the prototype with 2 Organisers and 3 attendees.
Testing Strategy - Think Aloud testing with 3 Tasks, story creation, viewing and taking actions on them and users were able to perform them seamlessly.
The feature was easy to discover and easy to understand.
