Case Study: HomeBuddies, an app that normalizes staying in to take a break from an overly social post-COVID world.

Background & Context

“A season of loneliness and isolation is when the caterpillar gets its wings.” — Mandy Hale

Successive lockdowns all over the world have forced people to spend more time by themselves. The pandemic called for a time of introspection and reflection. We had to shift from a world where we were constantly busy and barely had time to sit and reflect to a world where we had endless amounts of time to do just that.

Currently, we are on our way out of the pandemic with more people getting vaccinated, more restrictions being lifted, and people regaining more of their freedoms. As we emerge from COVID, how will we readjust to a busier world where we have less time for ourselves? How will we hold onto the lessons we learned and realizations we made? What will life be like as things go back to “normal”? And above all, how will we connect with others after so much time spent in social isolation?

User Interviews

We interviewed the user group whose social life was most drastically changed by COVID: college students. The interviews shed light on some intricate challenges that students are likely to face in a post-COVID world, which are highlighted below.

“I’m anxious about losing myself by being too social and not having enough time for myself”

Insight: some college students value their alone time and don’t want to be social all the time

HMW Question: How might we ensure we do not lose ourselves and our new healthy habits in the process of being more social again?

“You always see more of the people who are out and having fun, whereas those staying indoors rarely show that off”

Insight: the current norm is to celebrate people going out; most social media platforms condone sharing about nights out, which makes it seem like everyone but you is out having fun

HMW Question: How might we make people feel less lonely when staying in and other people are socializing?

“The default will shift from it being okay to stay in to there being an expectation that you go out and socialize every chance you get”

Insight: During the pandemic, it’s completely fine to stay in because that’s what everyone is doing. After COVID, the norm will shift and introverts may feel left behind and their habits even less supported than before COVID.

HMW Question: How might we make students more confident in their decision to stay in as pressure to go out increases?

“It’s all about seeing other people doing the same thing as well. When you see someone in your situation or even worse, you just feel better.”

Insight: this highlighted the importance of knowing who else is in the same boat in order to feel better about oneself and more confident in one’s decision to stay in.

HMW Question: How might we create a sense of community among introverts?

From our ten user interviews with students from all corners of campus, as well as a detailed journey map (shown below), we generated many more insights and HMWs regarding what connecting in a post-COVID world could look like.

After evaluating all our HMW questions, we narrowed them down to the following:

Brainstorming

Informed by our final HMW question, we used mind maps to come up with possible solutions.

We followed up by using the Crazy 8s method to brainstorm solutions through sketching.

Sketches

We selected the solutions that we thought most aligned with our insights and our HMW question. We ended up with the following sketches:

Greyscales

To evaluate our idea, we converted our final sketches into Greyscale prototypes. We expanded on the final sketches by adding more screens and prepared two different prototypes in order to get feedback on as many variations as possible.

Market Research

We conducted market research by looking at four apps that connect people in different ways: Instagram, Snapchat, Unmasked, and Beer Buddy. We specifically looked at what UX and UI elements made the apps better at fostering connections, and what elements put pressure on the user to act in a certain way.

We found that the likes feature on Instagram makes users feel compelled to post content that people would like. We decided not to include this feature in our app because we didn’t want users to feel the same sense of inadequacy that most social media apps tend to make us feel.

We also considered incorporating a feature similar to Snap Maps but decided against it because we didn’t want the user to feel left out when they saw that all their friends are out somewhere.

We learned a lot from Beer Buddy, specifically the simplicity of the posting feature. We wanted to put as little pressure on the user to create content as possible.

Feedback

After completing our first iterations, we got some valuable feedback from our design mentors that we iterated upon for our final screens. The questions they asked us prompted us to make some major modifications to emphasize the purpose of our app of normalizing staying in while eliminating social pressures:

How far can you go in supporting people in their decision to stay in without this just being another social media app?

Proposed solutions: Getting rid of ability to post photos and getting rid of the Invites feature to eliminate social pressures to meet with friends who invited them.

How can you design this app to boost confidence in the user’s decision to stay in?

Proposed solution: A message of encouragement for the user whenever they make a new post about them staying in.

How can we see that friends are standing behind us and our decision to stay in?

Proposed solutions: Friends being able to show their support or indicating that they are also staying in (with a “me too” and an “i support” button rather than likes)

“How can we put less pressure on the user to create content when they are not feeling confident in their decision to stay in?”

Proposed solution: Instead of the user having to create their own caption, they can choose from an array of options for a simplified post on why they are staying in on a certain night.

Usability Testing

We submitted our modified High Fidelity prototype to usertesting.com where we asked users to document their experience with our prototype while prompting them to complete the main tasks of our app. These were the main changes we made in response to their feedback:

• Many users did not understand what the ‘+1’ button meant, so we changed this button to a ‘me too’ button to make it more intuitive.

• Some users pointed out that navigating to the chat from someone’s post takes them to the general chat screen instead of directly opening a private chat. We changed the prototype to take the user clicking “chat” on someone’s post directly to a private chat.

Main features

• A feed where the user can see who is staying in and react to their posts
• A create post feature that allows the user to post their staying in activity
• A notifications page allowing the user to see friends’ reactions to their posts
• A chats function
• Bio on profile with user’s favorite staying-in activities

Final Prototype

Takeaways & Next Steps

We created HomeBuddies to make people feel more confident and supported in their decision to stay in while others are going out. HomeBuddies allows the user to see and interact with others who are also staying in, and in doing so, fosters a sense of community that breaks the stigma around staying in. This will be crucial as we emerge from COVID so that we do not leave those behind who have learned to value taking time for themselves by staying in.

Designing this app was a very rewarding experience. However, due to limited time, we were unable to implement everything we envisioned. In the future, we hope to expand our prototype to include more personalized messages of encouragement after posting a staying-in activity, more customizable activities, and to get all the buttons working.