Alone Together

Literature review
User research
Brainstorming
Paper prototyping
User testing
Low-fi design
Visual design

Problem

Action groups by social organizations such as the British Red Cross

These groups bring together experts to develop solutions including hosting a roundtable or policy workshop; hosting networking events, etc. One interesting highlight: people feel even better when they are helping others instead of being helped. 

Social networking apps

There are social apps such as Bumble, Tinder, and Discord for users to meet new friends and make connections. They have different focuses (dating, networking). Using an app to network is considered easier than doing so in real life as it avoids embarrassment and provides a buffer between people.

Mediation apps

For example, Headspace is an app that aims to help people live a healthy and happy life. Whenever users feel sad, depressed or lonely, they can tell Headspace how they feel currently and the app will suggest suitable meditations and mindfulness techniques for them. 

In order to understand:
1) when and why international students feel lonely;
2) the mental or physical effect of loneliness;
3) what can reduce the effect of loneliness

We decided to use Design Probes!

The idea of design probes is similar to the one introduced by Gaver, Dunne, and Pacenti in 1999. It is to give participants a package of materials that can provoke inspirational responses from them. Our probes contains two parts.

Part 1 Candy prompt to gather in-situ data (See item 1, 2, 3 in the image)

Participants were given a box of candy. They were asked to have a piece anytime they felt lonely to comfort themselves. The candy serves as a reminder for them to add a note (written, audio, video) at the moment about five aspects: What was the effect like? Mental and/or physical or both? Can you describe it? Where are you? Who are you with? What was the context? How did (or are you going to) cope with it?

Part 2 Emotion diary as a reflection (See item 4, 5 in the image)

Participants were given a physical Emotion Diary for 7 days. A physical diary was chosen over a digital one to encourage uninterrupted and undistracted reflection. In order to make sure the users will be motivated and feel related to the diary, we customized the color of diary cover using the users' favorite colors and designed the diary pages in a visually-appealing way.

Primary persona: Maya

Maya is relatively new to the United States and has not completely adapted to the change. She is sensitive and not that into socializing. She suffers from a constant feeling of loneliness.

Secondary persona Lee

Lee is quite comfortable socializing with others. He likes to meet new people. However, Lee just broke up with his girlfriend. This huge change makes him doubt himself and he feels depressed. Whenever he thinks about the good, old days with his girlfriend, he feels extremely lonely.

Key Findings

1. Effects of being an international student

• Cultural differences such as language, habit or even food make it difficult for international students to connect with people.
• Making new friends can be especially difficult in the beginning.

“I miss home and the comfort of mom’s food, here I feel like I am putting junk in my body. I did not know food could affect my mood so.”

2. Circumstances that triggers the lonely feeling

• When there is no one to talk to about their daily ups and downs.
• Different food choices and weather conditions (cold and dark).
• Being alone or in a closed space triggers self-introspection and leads to loneliness.

“I was walking to the bus station on a winter night. It was cold and I feel lonely, bored and frustrated. I wanted to talk with my friends in hometown but they were at work, so I have no idea but talking to myself to feel better.”

3. Effects of loneliness

• Social awkwardness and a decrease in social confidence
• Inability to concentrate
• Increase in self-loathing and self-doubt

"I couldn't sleep well that night because I felt very lonely and sad. and When I woke up I felt tired and my mental concentration was not proper during the study that day."

Firstly define design requirements

1. The design should be easily accessible such as an app since the majority of users do not actively seek help from others when they feel lonely
2. Confidentiality and anonymity needs to be ensured
3. To allow users to have someone else to talk to such as a chatbot or a helpline
4. To help effectively translate users’ demotivation & loneliness to productive pursuits

While these ideas had their own advantages, they were standalone solutions. They missed out on having an actual human on the other side ready to listen and respond — something our user research pointed to.

We then tried to combine these ideas so that it solved more than one problem and incorporated the human factor. That’s when Alone Together was born. A crowdsourced yet completely anonymous mobile application with two user profiles.

Regular User: one who is lonely and wants to express & be listened to. A regular user can find a chat partner to express themselves to feel better. International students specifically can find someone who speaks their language whenever they feel lonely and need someone to talk to.

Volunteer: one who listens & responds. As for the volunteers, they would benefit from feeling more productive and useful. A study also mentioned that giving care to another human contributes to overall well-being

A user can be both a regular user & a volunteer

Functions for Regular Users

• Setup their profile(languages they prefer, problems they are facing, age, gender, a short bio)
• See potential matches that fit the criteria filled in their profile
• Choose someone themselves or let the app pick one for them
• Send images, voice notes during a chat and report the abuse of any kind
• Get more help if required after chatting by talking with another volunteer or reading mental health tips.

Functions for Volunteers

• Setup their profile and do a short training about how to talk and respond
• Receive invites from regular users to chat (they are not given the freedom to choose who to help — the app does that for them based on their fit for someone who needs help)
• Are rewarded with Pocket Points after their chat
  

We recruited 4 participants. They were all international students. Since our design involves two user profiles, we divided the test into two parts. Each part had its own scenarios and user tasks: 1) For regular users, we asked them to imagine that they are lonely and try to use Alone Together to express themselves. We also created another scenario to test the report abuse feature. 2) As for volunteers, their main tasks were to complete the volunteer training and help someone.

Click to see the scenarios and tasks.

During the test, we asked users to think-aloud and had one of our team members act as their counterpart. For example, if the user was testing from the regular user’s perspective, the team member would act as a volunteer to chat with them.

Click to see the transcript.

We also showed our design prototypes to our design probes participants to validate our idea.

Key Findings

We got a lot of valuable feedback from the overall concept to usability issues. While here I’m only going to talk about the three most significant findings that led to major changes to the design.

1. Clearly separating the roles of lonely person and talking with a VOLUNTEER may not be the best way to bring emotional solace.

“I don’t feel emotionally connected if I know the counterpart is talking to me as a volunteer. It feels like the volunteer is just trying to finish a task.”

“I don’t want to position myself as someone who need help. When I’m lonely not only expressing, but also listening can make me feel better. I want a two-way communication.”

Improvement 1: Instead of calling a user who wants to help "volunteer", we now name them as "listener". Also, we reduced the clear distinction between the two role. Users won’t have to choose one or the other, instead, they can just decide whether they are open to listen to other lonely people. If yes, it means they will be receiving chat invitations from people who want to express themselves.

Previous Design

Current Design

2. More information could help users to decide who to talk with and feel more reassured

“ I want to know more about the volunteer before deciding to talk to them, it would be nice to have rating and reviews of the volunteers”

Improvement 2: Provide more information to regular users to help them choose a suitable listener, such as age, reviews, bio, etc. Also, allow users to give feedback after talking to a volunteer so other users can know about the listener from different point of views. 

3. Pocket points rewarding system might defeat the original intention and the purpose of this design

"I appreciate the feature that you are rewarding listeners. I felt praised and it was a little surprise for me."

“ I have one concern: the monetary rewards may attract the wrong people who do not want to help but just want to earn money.”

Improvement 3: Instead of offering pocket points, use other motivating methods. For instance, visualizing and quantifying the contribution made by listeners, or provide a charity reward where listeners can donate their points to charity projects.

Visual guide

Now, let's start the journey

The onboarding process for new users

Welcome to Alone Together! Before you start, you will see a series of splash screens first to get a general understanding of what to expect here.

Then, let's set up your personal profile (age, gender, language, etc. ) so that we can recommend suitable people for you later on.

Tutorials help to create a consensus among the community

Feel like starting to chat right now? There is one last step! Go through a short training to learn about basic principles for being a good listener. A quiz is also required to prove that you have mastered the technique.

You can always come back to the tutorial after finishing it if you find it necessary.

Find suitable people to talk to

Based on your profile, we will craft a list of suitable listeners for you. You can review other users' profiles to choose the one you would like to talk to. Filters are provided to meet specific needs. You can also start a quick chat if you don’t want to spend time looking.

If you are willing to be a listener (receive chat invitation) you can also do it on the homepage by interacting with the toggle.

While waiting for the response, you can take the time to refresh

You can set the trigger(s) for your loneliness as well as your current loneliness level. This information can help your counterpart to better understand you so you can have a better conversation. Furthermore, it can help you to be more mindful about your loneliness and serves as a record if you want to keep.

If you are getting the chat invitations as a listener, you will be able to see the sender’s current situation so you can better communicate with him/her.

Enjoy talking! And we will ensure a safe and friendly environment for you

When talking, you can send stickers, pictures or voice messages, whatever helps you to better communicate!

Reporting function is provided to help protect you from getting inappropriate messages.

Let the warmth and kindness be seen :)

After talking, the user can express their feeling as well as appreciation to the listener. While for the listener, their kindness will be converted to donations for charity organizations cooperating with us.

Furthermore, as a listener, you will be able to see all the data about the people you have accompanied in your profile: numbers, reviews, and comments.

Future work

Tracking Function

It has been mentioned in the above explanation that users should be able to save the data about the reason they feel lonely and their loneliness level. It can also be seen from the interfaces that there is a calendar icon in the menu, which is saved for the tracking feature. One more crazy idea about this feature is to automatically generate reports that summarize the trigger, keywords from the chat, identified emotion change (like what Grammarly is doing, they can identify the tone through the words) after they finishing the chat. This is mainly for users to be more mindful and help them to view their loneliness from another perspective. However, due to time limitations, we did not work on it this time. Also, tracking this information can lead to privacy concerns for some users. Although the tracking function could be an interesting feature, it needs more validation and text.

Introduce more options for finding suitable people (Non-anonymous/ “old friends”)

During the test, several participants mentioned that they might feel more comfortable talking with non-anonymous. Therefore, providing Anonymous V.S. Non-anonymous profiles options could be another function to integrate.

Furthermore, two participants said they would like to talk with somebody they talked with before, because these people would be familiar with their background and context so they don't have to explain again and again. The idea would be to introduce a filter for “old friends” so that users can find people who they have talked with before to increase familiarity.

Thank you for reading!