This is my girlfriend. I think she’s the best, and I’m pretty sure she likes me too.
The problem started when she asked me what I considered “the beginning” of our relationship and I gave her the wrong date. Now, don’t get me wrong. The issue wasn’t that our answers didn’t match – she felt it was the day we first started talking, and I felt it was the day I asked her out.
The problem was the day I felt was most important was the wrong day.
(We’re fine by the way, thanks for asking.)
From that moment I began to consider how forgotten details and poor communication lead to conflict in relationships
So how did I get from dumb to Duya?
My Role
User Researcher
UX / UI Designer
Secondary Research
There are countless resources and studies on relationships and improving them – I could honestly be researching and reading till the end of time. But the core information that all these resources base their books and studies on can be boiled down into a few key pieces:
- Successful relationships are founded by people with strong communication skills
- All relationships have conflicts, and the primary conflicts in relationships are about communication
- Attentive partners who will change their behaviors to care for their partners will find the most success
- Human memory is not nearly as accurate as we believe. There is a correlation between partners who remember things their partner has said and resolving conflicts over time
When examining the app landscape to find something that would work to meet improve these difficulties for couples, I found that it was quite barren. Apps that sought to address these problems were few and far between.
Surveys
Rather than simply reading about couples in relationships, I sent out surveys to talk to some. So began my search to find interview candidates. Using social media networks, I distributed surveys that aimed to find my ideal candidates.
Over 80 people responded to my survey and roughly 35% fit my candidate criteria. However, when examing the data of respondents who fit my criteria, I found some interesting metrics.
Ideal Candidates
Ages 16 - 74
In a romantic relationship
Had experienced conflict within the past 3 months over something forgotten
82%
In a relationship 5+ years
72%
Relied on their memory over memory devices
41%
Struggled to remember details
Digging deeper, I found that 72% of ideal candidates relied on memory to be the most important of the metrics. While only 35% of respondents fit all three criteria, nearly 60% of respondents were of the right age and relationship status. It was nearly half of the 60% were respondents who had experienced conflict within 3 months and nearly 75% of them relied on their memory.
What set me thinking was that my results were likely higher in reality. If this large percentage of participants are relying on their memory and not devices, it’s quite possible that respondents who answered that they did not experience conflict may have – and forgotten.
Interviews
7 Interviews
12 Years +
Interviewed some couples (individually)
I contacted my ideal candidates and interviewed a total of 7 participants. I spoke to both men and women in relationships ranging from a couple of months to more than 12 years. What struck me most was they ranged vastly in how they thought and approached relationships – even from their own partner!
As one participant described, “I’m a big tracker. I’m basically a quantifiable person.” Yet, their partner was nearly the complete opposite – they hardly tracked or wrote down anything. I encountered this more than once when I interviewed both partners of a relationship.
But there was a common thread that ran through all of my interviews:
Communication is key.
Affinity & Empathy Maps
Brain full of details and a notepad full of notes, I started sorting out the details I gathered from my interviewees. Filtering out my notes into their categories, I found that there were five key spectrums that my interviewees spoke on.
Time/Goals, Interpersonal/Personal, Low/High Effort, Little Things, and External Factors.
Time-Goals
The longer a relationship lasted, the more couple’s goals aligned
Interpersonal-Personal
Perceptions of the partner and the partner’s self-perception don’t always align
Low-High Effort
People in a relationship may not have the same level of effort
Little Things
Not every person considers the same thing “little”
External Factors
Outside forces weigh on a relationship
Sorting the notes into their affinities allowed me to see clearly how conflicts could possibly begin to arise in relationships. As I empathized with my users, I mapped out what they might possibly think, feel, and say. The results coalesced into two empathy maps.
Empathy Map 1
Empathy Map 2
Click to enlarge
User Personas
With empathy maps in hand, the user personas took shape: Stay-At-Home Sally and Dating Dave. Stay-At-Home Sally and Dating Dave are just as likely to be in the same relationship as they are with others, and conflict arises especially when these two get together.
- Female
- 33 years old
- Married
- Children
Goals
· Equitably share the daily tasks and chores
· For the family to follow a unified calendar
· Restore their romance, and to look forward to
important days together
· Work together towards their goals
Frustrations
· Constantly has to remind her husband of tasks
· Feels solely burdened with the home’s chores
· Feels unloved when he forgets important dates
· He relies on her, but she cannot rely on him
- Male
- 26 years old
- Dating
- No children
Goals
· Be with someone who shares his values
· Avoid stress and enjoy life
· Keep technology a tool and not a focus
Frustrations
· Spending too much time on his phone
· Being held strictly to a schedule
· She wants to take the relationship to the next
level, and he’s not ready for that
"How Might We?"
With my participants and user personas in mind, I set to work to determine how I might best reduce conflict and improve their relationships. In the end, I settled on three “How might we” statements which drove my ideation.
HMW #1
How might we reduce poor communication and miscommunication between partners on a daily basis?
HMW #2
How might we help partners coordinate their short-term and long-term goals?
HMW #3
How might we assist users in sharing experiences with their partners?
Ideas & Iteration
HMW Brainstorming
I used the HMW statements as the foundation of my brainstorming and mind mapping. The ideation led to countless ideas before I narrowed them down to three ideas. A memory mood board, a daily check-in, and gamification of tasks.
I settled on the conversational quizzes being the primary drive for further iteration before rolling in aspects of the memory mood board into a combined idea.
User Stories
Having combined my idea of a memory mood board and a daily check-in, I set to writing the epics for my MVP.
After writing and rewriting the epics through the multiple iterations of Duya, I found that the most important ones were the partner connection, Duya entry, and entry search.
These epics went through the most iterations and ultimately became my red routes.
Future features to build for the app include the capability of expanding the shared storage for users as well as connecting the app to a counselor.
The counselor feature would possibly necessitate a redesign of some portions, or possibly require a companion app. Since the main focus is to improve communication and reduce conflict, this feature would be beneficial but not necessary for the MVP.
With each iteration, my sitemap changed accordingly. Its most recent version includes the simplification of the site down to three main tabs which follow my red routes: Profile, Duya, and History.
User Flows
Duya’s red routes were my main focus. The app would be pointless without connecting to a partner, it would fail to achieve its purpose if you couldn’t communicate, and it would be impossible for it to help memory if you couldn’t search for a post.
Connect to your partner
Answer a Duya prompt
Search for a post
Click to enlarge
Sketches
Red routes identified and ideas flowing, I quickly and roughly sketched out my thoughts and designs for the app. The first pass was rough, but some of the design choices remained even till the latest version, like the grayed-out answer on the Duya page.
Profile
Connect
Summary
Duya Unfilled
Duya Comments
Click to enlarge
However, some pages received major overhauls. I gave my sketches a few passes, cleaning up the pencil marks and improving the heuristics of my designs. Rather than have the Summary tab be most convenient to the right thumb, I swapped the arrangement of the tabs (Summary to the leftmost and Profile to the rightmost) to have it follow the standard heuristic practices.
Profile
Connect
Summary
Duya Unfilled
Duya Comments
Click to enlarge
Wireframes
Initially, my wireframes had 4 tabs. In addition to the Duya Prompt, History, and Profile tabs was a Summary tab – meant to host notifications, an indication if your partner had completed today’s prompt, as well as some recent activity or past memories on that particular day. As well, the 4 tabs were broken up by the central “+” button for an always accessible upload button.
Sign-Up
Profile
Partner
Summary
Duya Unfilled
Comments
Click to enlarge
However, guerilla testing proved that this design needed quite a bit of alteration. The Summary tab didn’t become the homepage that I had originally imagined – participants believed it was the place that the Duya prompts lived and were not positive about what the recent activity indicated.
Further iteration brought me closer to my current design of three tabs: Duya, History, and Profile. Ultimately, the functions of the Summary page were unnecessary. Rather than having multiples places for the same information, the three tabs kept the design streamlined.
Sign-Up
Profile
Partner
Duya Unfilled
Comments
History
Click to enlarge
Moodboard & Style Guide
Moodboard
Now that I knew the direction I would take Duya, I considered how to convey the feeling and approach to my users through fonts, colours, and shapes.
I sought out colours and images to convey feelings of connection, intimacy, and reflection.
The tints and shades of blue evoke the calm, cool, consideration needed to bring the user down to earth and consider before answering the daily prompts.
For the whites and grays, I chose off-whites to convey a rich journal, like a Moleskine, to give a feeling of quality paper despite its digital nature.
Colours
Partner Entry / Disabled Button / Pop-Up Banner
Primary Colour / Enabled Button
User Entry / Pressed Button
Background White
Pop-Up Background / Idle Form
Divider / Unfilled Form
Header Text / Filled Form
Text / Selected Form
Accent
Typography
Icons
Buttons
Forms
I chose Newsreader to continue the image of a journal or print with the headers. For the main text, I selected Montserrat for its readability. For the icons and buttons, I shied away from hard edges and corners to steer from the thought of harsh confrontation.
High-Fidelity Screens
With the style guide in place, I dove in to make it a high-fidelity reality. Shown below are the latest high-fidelity screens iterated after multiple usability tests and matching my style guide.
Of course, just designing screens is not enough. You have to actually test the things.
Usability Testing
Taking the high-fidelity goodness to the (digital) streets, I ran two rounds of five participants walking through the scenarios I had assembled. In all three scenarios, I identified major changes that needed to be made in order to improve my users’ experience. By the end of the two rounds of usability testing, the design changes had dramatically improved results.
Usability Testing Round 1
Usability Testing Round 2
Sign up for an account and connect to your partner
The design choice needing a major change was the final page of the onboarding procedure. Initially, the final step was the completion of a pop-up menu for the partner connection.
Users were unclear if they had actually completed the process. I redesigned the pop-up to be its own page, intended to be the last and final page of the onboarding process. However, users became confused – they felt that there must be more to the process and that pressing the ‘back’ button would be moving backward.
My final iteration added the pop-up to indicate the process was complete. The majority of users were satisfied with this design change. I think this screen still has room for improvement, and further testing is necessary.
Read your partner's Duya entry and respond to it
During this scenario, I noticed that most users became distracted by the rating slider that sat between the Duya answers and the further comments. When asked, it was unclear to my participants what exactly the slider was for – I received a whole host of answers.
In my next iteration, I removed the slider completely. The users in the next round of testing moved seamlessly through the scenario and were no longer hung up by the slider. While I removed the feature from its place on the Duya tab, it will likely become its own feature in a future build.
Locate and respond to a specific, previous entry
The most incredible finding that came out of rounds of usability testing was the filter button.
Initially, the Search and Filter functions located on the History Tab were originally combined under the magnifying glass. This design was scrapped in favour of the second, to separate the functions and to keep them from being hidden.
After the first round, the Search function was received perfectly. But not a single participant saw the Filter button! They only noticed it once prompted in the questions following.
My final design placed it in line with the Search bar and increased the size to match its height. Through questioning after the second round, I found all participants saw and understood what its purpose was. Success!
My solution is Duya: an app designed to cultivate conversation and to create a private history of shared memories and media.
The purpose is to create a space where a couple can create a shared journal of photos, videos, and journals that is not under the scrutiny of social media. It can be the place to put up that photo you like without Aunt Becky making a snide remark or the place to ask on that family portrait “Wait, WHO’S that again?”
But most impactful are the prompts: open-ended questions asked daily but you can’t see what your partner’s written until you’ve answered. Both parties provide their own perspectives, stirring up conversation and creating a deeper connection.
Try Out Duya
So what did I learn through this process?
- Communication is key, not just in relationships but in listening and speaking with my users
- Write down everything, especially in the ideation stage
- Pixels matter, and it only takes a couple for a user to see or not see a feature
And if I’ve learned anything else, it’s that my girlfriend is always willing to give me a reminder of the important things.
