Globond

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  GLOBOND user research

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  GLOBOND user persona

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  GLOBOND hi-fidelity prototype 2

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  GLOBOND hi-fidelity prototype 3

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  GLOBOND hi-fidelity prototype 1

Inspiration

We were inspired by our personal experiences as international students who went far away from home to study in another country. We felt like we were having difficulties communicating with family and friends back home, thus we wanted to find ways to improve that.

What it does

This is a social community app that facilitates easy and fun communications between international students and their family and friends across the globe. How it differs from a normal social media app are the special functions it provides, which include intuitive display of time, location, and activity status, live sessions to connect with friends while doing daily activities, daily prompts to share authentic moments in one’s life, and fun conversation starters to help you start chatting. It also provides functions users are more familiar with, which include a daily feed and messaging function.

How we built it

After conducting 5 interviews with students who live far away from their friends and family, we sorted out the three key insights to this problem: (1) the user feels confused by the different timezones (2) the user feels disconnected due to the lack of intimacy in the virtual world; (3) the user feels hesitated to share for not knowing what to talk about with their friends and family. These painpoints lead the students to diminish their connections with their friends and family in their home country, in terms of both frequency and quality. Empathizing with the user through systematic analysis, we realize that despite the hardship and turbulent feelings, international students still deeply thrive to authentically connect with their friends and family back home. The problem is the far-fetched, uncomfortable “journey” from realizing the student’s desire to really act upon it to accomplish their goal. Through another quantitive research using a survey to understand the role of technology in the students’ communication with their parents, we found that applications or communication platform could do more than just a static means. With Globond, we transport the technology’s infinite power into creating intimate, meaningful connections that could transcend the barrier of time and space differences. Anchoring in three main implementations: sharing real-time moments, engaging with new conversations and immersing in a fun, interactive space.

Challenges we ran into

There were 3 major challenges. The first one was finding people for interview. The second one was finishing the Throughout the design process, we've encountered several difficulties that our team has worked on together to overcome it. The first challenge would be to step out of each of us's personal experience and opinion to really listen to the user, and each other - willing to see the story that we thought we own in a different perspective. During the initial discussion, we've talked about our own experiences as international students and realize that with just a sample of three potential users (which are us), we've already seen so many different approaches. We then agreed on the attitude of really keep our mind open, and listen to the user's experiences in an empathic way during our interviewing sections. Within 48 hours, we've sat down countless time to argue about the problems we feel like the application hasn't solved wholly. Each of this argument will include at least five more iterations upon the first one to define our most plausible solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We went through the whole UX process and created a functional and beautiful prototype in 48 hours. We pushed through the challenges and strived for perfection. We created a product that is deeply meaningful to us. Moreover, it will actually benefit people like us in their daily lives.

What we learned

We’ve learned tremendously from this experience. Here are some key take-aways we got from this experience: Narrow down a general problem into small and specific points. During our design process, we’ve been confused by questions that were too board. Once we sat down and talked more about the tangible things, or the more detailed things, we started to see the guidance to our solutions. A UX problem sometimes rooted from a social problem. We realized how social interactions could affect the user’s experience, and vice versa. It isn’t solely rely on how fast the user could press a button or how agile they could navigate the screens. Being more mindful of this fact help us make more holistic design decisions. Iterate to communicate. When encountering any difficulties, we always sit down and iterates as much as we can. Through iterating, we came to understand more of our teammates’ idea, and that’s how we find the best idea.

What's next for Globond

After the Catalyst Designathon, we look forward to continuing on revising our design, conducting more user research to gaining more fruitful insights and hopefully can deliever our products to the community.

Built With

• figma