Design Better

Team: Amoli Mehta, Anish Nangia, Eric Van Scoik and Sean Warsaw

Timeframe: Two weeks

Design Challenge: Design a forum that solves some of the pitfalls of their current thread-based design of initial post and subsequent comments, without losing the benefits that these online communities provide. 

Design Direction: We used affinity diagrams to talk about the positive and negative aspects of the current forum design. In the end, we decided to focus on changing the experience of finding relevant posts on these sites and how this new experience could engage users that typically do not contribute to the conversation. 

Predispositions: Beginning this project, we began exploring these changes through the lens of entertainment forums. However, we quickly discovered that using such a broad theme for this project would make it difficult for us to identify the strengths and weaknesses of our design or find relevant research for this project. Instead, we decided to constrain ourselves to medical forums, which provided us with an opportunity to examine the success of our design against the goals we set out to achieve for this project.  

Research: Finding pain points that health-related forum visitors commonly experience was easy. The popularity of medical forums provided us with several avenues that we could explore, but we felt that our focus needed to be more constrained to ensure that we weren't trying to do too much, so given our access to people living with Lupus, we decided to build a forum for people living with Lupus. I conducted a series of interviews with people living with the disease and found that they had both been very involved in online Lupus forums. 

Insights: Given the serious nature of health-related forums, we found that although people often find support, receive helpful tips from other forum members and learn to manage their symptoms more quickly through these communities, they also feel depressed by the stories of others and may even stop visiting these sites to preserve their emotional health. From these insights, we decided to design a forum that would help people find relevant information quickly which would create more robust dialogue, and allow people to filter out posts that are not of interest. 

Concepts: Our design concept was to provide users with the ability to follow posts by category or by the comment poster, to ensure that the information they want to see can be easily accessed. These posts would appear in a curated view that would learn their likes and dislikes dynamically. Additionally, users could search by category to view all posts available on the site.

Prototypes:

My Role: I served as team leader and facilitator on this project. My contributions were researching online community health forums, interviews, ideation, affinity diagrams, personas, and comparative analysis, 

Postmortem: During this project, I learned that research methods are an important part of the design process. Without the insights we gained from interviews, articles and comparative analysis, we would not have found the opportunities for improvement that we needed to explore the vast possibilities that online communities hold.