Chat Togethr

What it does

Chat Togethr is a SMS app that replaces your current messaging app and will send scheduled text messages to your contacts to help you stay connected to your community

What is our problem?

Apps and digital products have offered many ways to build community and stay connected. How can we provide platforms that are safe and supportive, to mitigate feelings of isolation and loneliness and help individuals become part of a larger community?

What is the problem?

How can we help people connect to their community?

What is our solution?

Provide automatic means to letting people contact others in their community.

How did we approach it

Since neither of us have experience studying Product Design or HCI, we chose to follow the Double Diamond approach. We explored over a dozen ideas for apps to build and then conducted user research to make design requirements and select the best solution.

User research [ Primary ]

There are many research studies over what it takes to get people to build strong communities and the most frequent one way we saw to build communities was by .... communicating.

Often times, communicating by a simple text or email is more than enough to get people engaging with others in their community. [1.1] The problem is, many people don't keep up with loved ones as much as they should. Research also shows that people are 60% more likely to reply to a message then send one themselves; even if it is for someone they really want to talk to. [1.2]

Insight -So the real question is, how can we initiate sending the first message with people? When that is answered, we can directly build communities proportionally!

[1.1] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-83152-001 [1.2]https://www.jstor.org/stable/1938299?casa_token=6zmKSZLQTTIAAAAA%3AlqrD4Pn8KZ-0nBpJpdUNYpXDtzyFQiPcobxozTMfCaI8m-fbFloR7EPuIMiLob6imU8YiHJdDfA_WhS986eAf0MrfV79_c1CX4jKvk1D-A35ZxPNIJ1j&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

User research [ Secondary ]

Our research shows that college students in particular are very bad at this. College students seem to mainly forget to contact or message people they care about . Survey Data *Insight - * People forget to contact loved ones but want to contact them more often.

Brainstorming

During the brainstorming process, we used several tools like Figma, Framer, Draw.io, and more. You can see more in our Google Photos here

Design Requirements

Must create a positive experience for all involved and their community
Must keep identity hidden by anonymizing individual information
Must enable chatting and /or calling
Must connect someone to another person
Must build community autonomously when not in use.

Selecting the best solution

We narrowed down over a dozen ideas to 4 by orally communicating over Sesame Chat. Then we use a logic matrix and Google Sheets to rate each of the top 4 ideas based on how well they met each design requirement for the user research.

We narrowed it down to two ideas and we chose to focus on just Chat Togethr because we felt it could be used as a mobile and web extension application to provide more accessibility to users. Top 2 ideas

We focused on 2 main user flows. Onboarding and schedule sending.

Our Solution Explained

Chat Togethr is a SMS based app like Textra that allows users to send messages from their phone number to any other phone number.

We chose to do this so that users wouldn't need to require friends and family to download a new app . And we felt it also comes off as more genuine and human when a message is coming directly from someone's phone number. Our app can be used on the web chrome extension ( so, in any browser ) and on mobile so any time you have your browser open, you can easily set up a scheduled greeting.

High Level Gifs



Chat Togethr functions just like a normal messaging app! You can send texts from your phone as normal	Auto greetings is a feature to let you automaticaly send a greeting if you haven't messaged someone in the frequency specified already!



If you want to get reminders to keep up with people, add them to your Inner Pod! We will keep you in contact with them with additional notifications!	Automatic greetings can be generated! We let you write up to 8 possible greetings and we will randomly chose one to send on your behalf!

Features

** Automatic Greetings ** Automatic Greetings is a feature that lets you write several automatic greetings if you forget to text someone within a given week, month, year ( up to you to choose ) . You can pick the day of the week and what the messages will say and we will automatically randomly pick a greeting to make you sound more like you! 😊

Inner Pods Some people like family and best friends always come first. So we have an option to let you check up on them more frequently than others contacts by sending you desktop notifications about them. Auto Greeting

Text messaging ** We are just like iMessage or any other SMS app - so you can do all your texting from us. The point of this feature is so we can fit into people's current **daily lives without disrupting them with a brand new application Text Messaging app

Automatic, random monthly greetings They can be monthly, weekly, daily, yearly etc. It is up to you to choose! If you haven't sent someone a message in that fixed amount of time from your Inner Pod, we will automatically send one for you.

Security and Privacy are top Priorities We let you either manually enter your contacts or we let you sync with them! (But of course, we ask for permission first) Sync Contacts

Browser based extension We went for a browser extension instead of a website because we wanted to send notifications instantly to you if we think you need to contact someone. In this example, you can see the notification from the Chrome browser requesting you to make an event for your Mom 😎 Extenstion

How does our solution solve the problem?

Conclusion

Sample user onboarding test

Results of testing

Due to time constraints, we could only interview a few people and users loved how the product fit into their day to day life cycle. Especially since they can send messages directly from their web browser. Auto Greetings in Action

100% of users used the app as expected
100% said they would use this app on a regular basis.
80% loved the chatting feature!

How we built it

We used the following

Draw .io for low fidelity wireframing
Excel for data calculations and research interpretations
Google Forms
Figma for high fidelity wireframes
Framer for creating additional features and putting everything together

Challenges we ran into

There were some technical issues with using Framer & Figma. Also since one of had never used any sort of design tool before, there was a bit of a learning curve which was challenging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

the design we were able to accomplish under such a short amount of time
the overall user flow and layout of the app
improving our skills with Figma and Framer

What we learned

We learned about how to think and innovate under a short amount of time. We also learned how to design something reactively so that it can be reused for iOS, Android, and Web Extensions.