DURATION
14 days: June 2021
ROLE
Solo project for Google course
Challenge
There is only a few social networking platforms designed for researchers and scientists, however, they are lack of some important features. User experience is more important than ever in today’s digital age, and with more natural progression toward online networking, remote work and virtual events, the needs for an app with a more human social experience is imperative.
Solution
With ResearchVibe, I worked on creating a solution with adding a new mode of communication through audio and video chat that aims to enhance the way researchers and scientists connect to each other and share their findings around the world.
RESEARCH
Kickoff
Starting off, I asked myself a few initial questions. Who is my primary user? What kind of goals do they have? What challenges do they have using the existing apps? Why would they want to use this application?
Evaluating Target Market
Just how many scientists and researcher exist worldwide? According to UNESCO report, there were 8.8 million full-time researchers in 2020. The number of scientists grew by 13.7% since 2015.
Source: UNESCO Science Report: towards 2030
Competitive Analysis
I evaluated several features deemed vital from interviews and identified which ones I could capitalize on to have a leg up over other applications. I found that there was only one app dedicated to researchers and scientists by enabling them to share, discover and discuss research. However, research community rarely used ResearchGate because it is very old looking database with lack of interesting features. Therefore, some of them used LinkedIn as an alternative.
Field Research
I interviewed with six participants working in the research community to understand their needs and learning about their pain points.
Affinity Diagram
I synthesized the observation from participants during interviews into ten clusters with common themes.
I went one step further and combining the groups that were related to each other to easily spot themes across all of the observations.
Aggregated Empathy Map
I gathered information from all participants to visualize their attitudes and behaviors in an aggregated empathy map.
Meet the Users
User Journey
Prioritization Plotting
Plotting a list of the possible features onto a graph helped narrow down what was absolutely crucial and could be built upon further down the road.
IDEATION
Storyboards
I visualize how users interact with the app.
User Flow
Use the Academic Social Networking App to share research, connect, and communicate with other scientists effectively and quickly.
Next Steps
I am currently in the design stage of the app. I will design different alternatives and conducting different testing methods including A/B testing and usability testing.