Sharing the most compassionate real stories in people voice — open source audio tales!
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UX Case Study by Sonali M, UX Designer
Prompt: Design an app to create and consume audio media and its various usage. Timeline: 2 weeks Deliverable: Lo-fi Prototype Tool: Balsamiq
Life has its own course and on every step each one of us have a story to share, If it’s good story, it’s wonderful and if it’s a bad one, its an experience. Sometimes you never know the true value of a moment until you share it with others — We must bring these ‘TALES’ out to our fellow citizens around the globe and radiate boundless experience with each other.
SHARING IS CARING
Most times, I have learned many of us and that includes me, are not open to share our experience on social platforms .We fear of social trolling and cyber attacks to express ourselves freely and sometime even simply to even ask for help . During the time of pandemic, where world is suffering in one end with crisis, there was a shift happening in another side of spectrum where people embraced others pain and suffering with lot more empathy and humility. I was curious to learn how people been consuming their daily news and how receptive they are to audio media . So I took upon this project with a an urge to discover the need and pain points of people’s media consumption habits and finding that gap if there is one!
RESEARCH I conducted users interview to learn about media consumptions habits and its usage. Interviewed 10 people from age group range 26–45, that includes 5 male and 5 female. All from various ethnic and professional background like student to journalist.
We asked :
What are some of your media consumption habits & behaviors?
How do you share your viewpoint to other ?
How pandemic has affected your life?
After my interview, I used affinity mapping to nail down few trends and takeaways.
Trends & Takeaways: Not to my surprise, almost all of my interviewee never share their opinions on social platforms rather they do in small groups where they can trust and relate back to. Most of them consume to read the news and articles than listen. Although, they have acknowledged the gaining trend of audio media is rising rapidly. There are also few platforms out there that translate text to voice so those articles can be consumed on the go. Speechify, Audum,Curio and not to be missed google translator. Nevertheless, all these mediums loose their original essence of expressions when they translated into voice. Some quotes that jumped right on …
“ Audio media had tremendously increased my daily media intake”
“I have no patience to read long lengthy articles, I lose interest and move on”
“Listening stories over reading help me multi task”
“People who are suffering are the ones least informed”
PROBLEM: 1.People are reserve to express their voice on wider platform and disclosing self identity and many of them lose their story in overwhelming media mayhem. 2. People are consuming too much destructive media than constructive
SCOPE: 1.Allow user to consume the media and also create their story via small audible notes in very intimate setting yet wider audience. Ability to connect with like minded individuals that they feel most comfortable to express their stories freely. 2.Small and time friendly media is also another important pain points that can be solved with short stories to keep audience involved and enticed.
DESIGN: I vaguely knew in my head what I wanted to ink in for this app so started working on some user flows to capture the very initial mind mapping thought process.
Then sketching all my thoughts into paper and kept re thinking the key features to assimilate the simple yet intutive way to connect people and their respective stories from all across the globe. I want user to not just consume the news through TALE but also share as well. So via TALE users can just not only able to record their story, pin the location and upload but also can share and consume LIVE so we added another unique feature where user can hear the stories as they been shared from any where in the world in their own language.
Wireframing these key features and ran some usability testing. After making the correction from the feedback. I created rapid prototype on Balsamiq.
NEXT STEPS:
Exploring multi-lingual voice translation in user’s language without loosing its orignaility
Adding connect feature so the users can create common interest groups and community of support.
Sharing ability on platforms like Medium, pod cast, Spotify, Apple music to grow the awareness and demand.
Conducting competitive analysis to add another layer to research and solidify the need and goals of users.
I like to continue to explore and expand my research on various stories of real people. TALE isn’t just about capturing our experince during pandemic but far beyond . Topics like #blacklivesmatter #relationships #LGBTQ #remotelearning #mental health to name few are just as potent.
