MessageMinder

Team

Faraz
Qureshi

Hugh
March

Lillian
Zhu

Tim
Vo

Problem and Design Overview

Keeping Up in a Fast-Paced Digital Conversation

In an era where rapid online communication is vital, it's surprisingly easy to overlook replying to messages. Studies reveal that while 50% of electronic replies occur within an hour, the remainder can extend to days, leading to unintentional neglect. In the case of loved ones and close friends this can then start to strain relationships. Our project, Mindful Messenger, aims to address this issue by helping users become more aware of their response times, thereby improving their communication habits and reducing the stress of digital interactions.

Design Research Process

Unraveling Texting Habits: A Study at the University of Washington

We embarked on a comprehensive study involving interviews and surveys with computer science students, aiming to delve into the underlying reasons behind poor texting habits. This approach provided both qualitative insights from interviews and quantitative data from surveys, helping to validate initial observations and uncover patterns in texting behavior.

Our four participants for the interviews were all Computer Science majors at the University of Washington. All of our participants are taking a higher workload, consisting of about 16-18 credits, and are involved in a variety of extracurricular activities and jobs such as on-campus organizations, teaching assistant roles, and research. Our participants varied in their perception of their text response speeds and also differed in opinion regarding the correlation between their busy workloads and text response levels. Overall, they demonstrated interest in the project concept as a whole and agreed that this is a relevant problem sphere to explore. The survey participants came from the same demographic background as the four previously described interview participants. We posted the survey on Instagram and also asked specifically via word of mouth and text to known Computer Science students. The survey aimed to achieve a wider pool of data at a more quantitative level, enabling us to draw patterns that help validate initial insights gathered from our interviews.

Key Insights

Understanding Response Times

Through our participant interviews, we found that there are several factors that influence someone's response time:

1. Urgency - We found that the urgency of the message was the biggest factor in determining response time. Two of our participants mentioned prioritizing responses if the texts were about making plans.
2. Location - We found that our participants would catch up on texting people back in certain locations, from work bathrooms and public transport to home.
3. Who's Texting - Our participants had diverse answers for who they prioritize. One of our participants prioritized responding to close friends and family, while another prioritized responding quickly to new acquaintances. Regardless, all of our participants prioritized responding quickly to a select few people.
4. Messaging Platform - All participants we interviewed primarily used one messaging platform such as iMessage or WhatsApp, where they prioritized responding to the most, while not so much prioritizing other platforms such as Discord, Instagram, or Snapchat.

Surprisingly, through our survey results, how busy someone was had little effect on their texting habits or response time. The majority of participants had a response time of less than 5 hours, and those who had a much longer response time weren't working more hours or taking more credits than average.

Diverse Reactions to Response Times

When participants were asked in a survey "How does being on the receiving end of slower response times make you feel?" responses varied greatly:

• "If it's something urgent, I feel frustrated. If it's something not so urgent but I sent it to a close friend, I might feel a little irritated. If it's just an acquaintance and the content of the message isn't important, I don't really care."
• "If it's someone i'm super close to i don't care, but if not then not the best."
• "I don't mind that much usually, but from certain people it does make me feel bad."

We found that participants feel anxiety over slow response times if the message content is important, or if they are messaging someone important. This expressed a need for our app to distinguish urgent messages and also allow people to track response times with certain people individually.

Technology as an Aid

Some participants utilized message tracking features in their apps, highlighting a need for more sophisticated solutions. For instance, one of our participants used the Google Pixel's native message app's functionality to keep track of people they needed to respond to, as people they need to follow-up on float to the top of their messages list.

Iterative Design Process

Design Focus

We wanted to design an app that allows students to be mindful about response times and maintain meaningful connections with friends and family through text. We found the best way to execute this was through mobile integration, since it supports both of our tasks well and our app will be in close proximity to where students communicate via text. The primary tasks our app supports are:

1. Tracking message response times in a conversation with a new acquaintance.

2. Getting advice for specific responses to a difficult conversation topic.

Process

We drafted our initial design on a paper prototype. We performed multiple iterations of heuristic analysis and usability testing. Our design was tested by three Allen School students or graduates, where we identified key issues with design heuristics, iterating on our paper prototype until we arrived at our final digital mockup.

Key Insights

Streamlined Bulk Usability

During the initial rounds of the paper prototype testing process, our participants posed the question: How can I add multiple contacts? This lack of functionality in our feature space was hugely overlooked during our rapid design process, and this realization drove the development of a significant amount of new pages and components that leaned into the flexibility and efficiency of use heuristics. Additionally, during the second round of paper prototype usability testing, a similar idea was mentioned that individually customizing the reminder setting thresholds for each new contact would be inefficient. From this, we added our bulk select, group reminder setting editing, and editing features that are pieces of functionality that are now core to our design.

Clarity of the Reply Space

Another uncovered aspect when conducting the second round of paper prototype testing was a lack of clarity in how one can access and view existing messages that are in need of responses. One of our participants voiced confusion about where the actual response generation button was, and also how to even navigate to the specific message in the first place. Initially, we only had four main app page tabs, yet after careful ideation when iterating our design into the digital mockup form, we realized that adding another page that housed solely the replies created a stronger clarity towards the reply generation feature for users.

Technology Context Integration

We were solely focused on developing the reply generation process during our initial iterations that we overlooked the notion that our users may simply need an opportunity to navigate from a reply message into the native messaging application. This "Go To Message" functionality in conjunction with the core generation feature was a suggestion that one of our paper prototype usability testing participants suggested, and it felt like such a clear and meaningful addition to our design. This idea leans into the notion of MessageMinder functioning more as a tool that empowers users to navigate to responding to messages at a consistent level, and it was interesting to discover how we overlooked this core idea in our initial design.

Resulting Design

MessageMinder: A Tool for Effective Digital Communication

Our final design includes two key tasks:

• Feature 1 (Mobile): Tracking message response times in a conversation with a new acquaintance.

Users are able to view a dashboard of their analytics and set goals for their response times. The app will then track their progress and provide reminders to respond to messages. As we see in the images, the user can first view their dashboard, click on the analytics widget to track their stats. They can then choose to add a contact. After adding a contact they can then configure a reminder for that contact and then view their analytics with that person.

These images show the workflow of task 1. A User can go from the homepage to the contact list, add a new contact, set reminders for that contact, and view contact-specific analytics.

• Feature 2 (Mobile): Automated advice for crafting appropriate responses in complex conversations.

Oftentimes users do not want to respond since the conversation requires too much thinking activation power to overcome. This task is designed to enable users to generate a response to a difficult conversation topic. As we see in the images to the right, users can view the conversation they want to respond to, click on the reply button, see what type of response they want to use, and then generate a response to that conversation. If they don't like it they can refresh until they are satisfied.

These images depict task 2. A user can view the conversation they want to respond to, click on the reply button, see what type of response they want to use, and then generate a response to that conversation. If they don't like it they can refresh until they are satisfied.