Filip Jaksic, Heinrich Grattenthaler, Jannis Widmer, Fabian Landwehr
<aside> 💡 Starting out with the mission to create an "Always-On Multi User Portal", we conducted several interviews, spotted central user needs, built a visual prototype and conducted user studies with this visual prototype. With everything we learned and after carefully considering the received feedback, we built a functional hi-fi prototype of our idea: GroupChat.ch. It is an online app for awesome group voice chats, which makes switching between groups faster and easier than ever by providing an intuitive and easy-to-use visual interface. Finally, we optimized the user interface using a genetic algorithm.
</aside>
<aside> 🔗 Live demo
</aside>
<aside> 🔗 Code on GitHub
</aside>
<aside> 🔗 Interview Questions (Google Doc)
</aside>
<aside> 🔗 Miro Whiteboard
</aside>
(Week 2-3)
In our first session, we compiled a list of interview questions. These interview questions were designed to find unmet needs of users. In particular, we didn't want to push interviewees into any direction but rather really listen to them and find out what they want and don't yet have.
During the week, we conducted a total of 9 interviews. We interviewed all kinds of people, including a veteran home-office software developer, a university teacher, a designer, an office employee, and a number of students. While the received answers were quite diverse, we did notice some common problems the interviewees were facing. For example, many people don't like video chatting with multiple people at the same time. The reason for this is that people talk over each other and that people aren't as engaged as in one-to-one video calls or meetings in person. Furthermore, we found out that people have a need for privacy when video chatting. Particularly, we understood that people sometimes just don't want to be seen, especially when conducting meetings in a private space. More problems, needs and insights can be found on our Miro affinity board.
Note that we don't publicize the interview-notes and audio recordings themselves as they contain privacy-sensitive information.
The goal of this project is to solve some of the problems our interviewees are facing. They have also expressed some clear needs and we will try to incorporate some of those in our idea.
Initially, we came up with some examples or possible use cases of a always-on portal: