Charlie Dowd.

Projects
Houseplant Blog (Concept UI)
Mighty: Confidence growth
Pantry: Reduce Food Waste
Rightmove: An improved 'Search' experience
WhatsApp: Smart Mute.
Links
charliedowd.here@gmail.com
LinkedIn

Projects

Houseplant Blog (Concept UI)
Mighty: Confidence growth
Pantry: Reduce Food Waste
Rightmove: An improved 'Search' experience
WhatsApp: Smart Mute.
charliedowd.here@prometric.com
Resume / CV
LinkedIn

As we grow older, fear and social anxiety can inhibit making new friends.

My goal was to help adults build social confidence, so I designed an app that gamifies the process of overcoming fear of rejection, to help them build friendships and community.

🔍 Research
🧠 Ideation
📱 Prototype
🎨 UI Design
🧪 Testing
☁  Personal Project
See the Final Results
🏆

Process & Reasoning

My starting point was to understand what stops people from entering social situations.

Interviews were my main research method because social anxiety is a sensitive condition and people experience their own subtly unique symptoms. I also got some proffesional insight by interviewing a GP and a life-coach. They shared two interesting methods that became fundamental to my final solution.

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I wanted to learn the tried methods from sufferers themselves.

The other big method was reading health-blogs. In recent years, the internet has exploded with information and advice on managing mental health conditions. I wanted to learn the tried methods from sufferers themselves.

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Redefined Problem

Users need to overcome the fear of rejection, thereby increasing self-esteem, so that they can build friendships and community.

Discarded Solution

Smart journal with personalised facts and encouragement based on keywords entered by the user. Journals are a lot of effortSmart journal with personalised facts and encouragement based on keywords entered by the user. But journals are a lot of effort and only become effective for some people.

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Discarded Solution

Tinder-style proximity buddy ups to encourage meetups between socially anxious people. I reckon it's viable but encouraging people to reach out would be a challenge, and pointless if they don't.

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Discarded Solution

Elocution drills on powerful self-embracing statements. Again a viable solution but it at the end of the day, practice in the real world is going to improve social confidence.

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Chosen Solution

A DuoLingo-style app that sets small sociable challenges for the user, gradually increasing in difficulty. It gamifies the user's progress into levels, growth monitoring, and earnable badges.  

But why did I choose THIS solution?

This is based on two findings from the interviews: life coaches use SMART “microgoals” which reduce intimidation and increase the achievability of goals. This invokes early success; kinda like “Agile” for someones life. Secondly, I discovered that UK doctors empower patients to find their own practical and emotional solutions which is called ‘social prescribing’. This method for continuous growth combined with self-empowerment would result in social confidence and independence.

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Two design principles that I wanted to adhere to...

Written and visual language would need to be very personable and high-encouragement to soften the “growing pains” of the challenges, and maximise user retention. Also the difficulty of the social challenges: too easy would be boring, too difficult would be overwhelming. Both result in user-dropoff. I solved this with a guage system at the onboarding stage, and the ability to change difficulty throughout.

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See iterations
📱>📱

User Testing & Iteration

The onboarding contained explainations and questions to gauge the user's initial confidence level. But most users skipped straight through it.

Most users didn't read it at all so I added a progress bar to give a sense of progress and I distilled the text into more digestible screens, and reduced the impact of the illustration to reduce distraction.

Before
After

When a user opened a social challenge they were suddenly faced with a wall of text explaining the psychology behind the challenge.

This was a huge speed bump for users. To address it I greatly reduced the wording and refine the flow by hidaccordion-buttons which could only be opened in order.

Before
After

The ‘Change Difficulty’ feature was added in case users found the challenge too overwhelming. But it seemed a bit too easy.

I had to find the balance between user-flow and effective growth. Growth is uncomfortable so I had to introduce a bit of friction for this feature so I reduced it in the hierarchy into a textual button.

Before
Before
After
Before

Final Results

This solution addresses the main barrier to achieving social confidence: fear of judgement.

Users needed a way to overcome the fear of rejection so that they could build friendships and community. This solution guides users gradually and encouragingly towards this goal without boring or overwhelming them.

Going forward...

A future revenue channel could be a feature for hiring life-coaches within the app, affording more personalised, human-centered advice and encouragement.

...Lessons Learned

High-fi wireframing started way too early. Going back I would've sketched a lot more, wireframed until I was happy with it, and then added the final styling right at the end.

charliedowd.here@gmail.com
CV / Resume
LinkedIn