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WordGram : The Social Gallery for Creatives

Introduction

Hustling through freelance web development, i finally saved up enough to buy a phone with a high quality camera. As i learnt the professional features of its camera through freinds, I got hooked to playing around with it and developing my pixel vision. Gradually my photo quality improved and I felt like I am ready to share my progress.

Alas! only to realise that there’s no good platform for it. Instagram the pioneer has long back pivoted into a tikitok clone with focus on reels which with all due respect warrant a different form of creativity.(Sometime a total lack of it)

On the other hand there are habit trackers but these are too individualised. And as creatives we all agree that we cannot develop art alone.

Thus I set out to develop an app for creatives that

Allows you to share one progress per day

Saves your content on a decentralised network

Rewards you for consistency.

My original idea was to design a web3 equivalent of instagram that stores your content on the filecoin network.

Process

Persona

This app was designed targetting an Indian youth (age 18-30) with the folloowing traits:

Sensititive about social clout but worried about too much time being spent consuming low quality content

Wants to develop a hobby that is hard to master and needs consistency

Concerned about ownership of content they produce

The research

Due to the constraint of 2 days, the research was limited to google forms questionnaire. The responses to which can be found

here.⁠

⁠

Research findings (as of 8PM IST)

100% participants reported trying to develop a hobby/ hard skill.

With 100% reporting to have attempted to get better at writing. Could this indicate that writing is a fundamental skill to other hobbies and thus a lucrative habit to target for a habit building app.

50 % selected instagram as preferred platform for sharing. Further research might indicate this is because they are habituated to the platform. 25% reported looking for a new platform

75% reported that a social aspect might have helped them grow faster.

Although 75% reported dissatisssfaction over a shift to reels , only 25% reported concern over storage location of content.

My role in the process

Since I participated alone, I had to complete the full process from research till mockup.

Learnings from the research :

The following inferences were made from the research :

It is required to narrow down user persona to writers and focus on their needs.

Focused down even narrower and made the app based on

atomic essays⁠

philosophy by ship30for30 to provide a guided path over a month.

Added a crypto based accountability system.

Mockups

All the mockups were done in figma. If the below embed fails to open, you can access them in this

drive folder⁠

⁠

Conclusion

Lessons learnt :

Working with a team would have kept me accountable to deliver a better product, once again emhpasising a need for apps around accountability.

This was my first UX case study and the time constraint to deliver forced me to dedicate time to the essential steps instead of wasting time doing my favoured parts of the process. Will be helpful in further case study building.

This designathon helped me change from someone who builds purely on own intuition to someone who values and integrates user feedback.

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