Time Out Magazine

From Magazine to Meet Ups

Year
2018

Type
Concept Project
Lean UX

This case study documents a 14 day design sprint and the work processes involved in creating a new service for Time Out magazine.

This is a concept project by a team of 4 designers — Cindy Chen, Matthew Rusk, Shruti Hallar, and myself.

About The Project

Duration

2 Weeks

Design Process

Double Diamond

Team

4 UX Designers

My Role

There were no pre-defined roles for this project. We allocated tasks at each design process; my main responsibilities were:

Conducting user research: creating a survey, interviewing 3 Time Out readers and conducting 5 user tests.
Field visit to a Time Out event
Synthesizing and analysing findings from user interviews and user testings
Ideation — identified MVP features and conceptualised the idea for the product

Brief

Time Out is a lifestyle magazine that provides entertainment, food, drink recommendations to an international audience through print and digital media. Time Out inspires and enables people to experience the best of the city they’re in, providing original editorial content for users to find things to do as well as curated lists of the best films, food, attractions, art, culture, shopping and nightlife activities. Operating in 108 cities, it has a monthly global audience reach of 242 million.

The Challenge
Time Out understands that to develop their brand and continue their success they need to explore and develop new ways of engaging users whilst leveraging their current service and the technology in their current mobile app, and create a social network based around individuals or groups meetings face to face, in real life. The new service would be called Team Up and would be introduced in London first, and then the rest of the world.

Target Device
Design for mobile/tablet - Responsive Website or Native Application

Client’s request
1. Real time communication between users in the app.
2. Users should be able to arrange face to face meetings at locations in London.
3. Groups of users should have clear instructions of where to go, and how to get there.

Discover

Since the new service targets existing Time Out users, we wanted to get more context of users behaviour and find out how the target demographic spend their leisure time alone/with friends, find recommendations and their behaviour around it. We interviewed respondents who read Time Out magazine and we discovered the following patterns:

No one uses the Time Out application, even though some are aware that it exists.
Recommendations & events are shared with a screenshot or a URL via WhatsApp.
Users voice their frustration with Time Out current desktop and mobile website as “too crowded”.

Persona

Scenario

Sami is searching online for something to do in London and shares it with her friends .

Sami needs an easy way to find inspiration of what to do in her free time and be able to share the activity with her friend to arrange a meet up, in order to have a good time this weekend.

Takeaway from user research

We decided to build a responsive website instead of a native application as we learned from our findings that:

Besides surfing the web on desktop, users search for things to do on the browser on their phone while they are on the go.
Time Out readers do not use the Time Out application.

Designing Solution for Sami

Design Studio and User Flow Ideation

Originally, we defined Team Up as a meet up between individuals/groups with the goal to help Sami arrange a face-to-face meet up with friends/colleagues. After several ideations we still couldn’t settle on a design that meets Sami’s need. I realised that our concept definition for Team Up was not specific enough — we didn’t know what kind of meet ups we were setting for our users. The realisation led me to question:
What is the motivation for a person to arrange a meet up with somebody?
As a result, we didn’t limit Team Up only to the scenario of meeting with friends on the weekend, as users in real-life experience several meet up scenarios — drink with friends, dinner with colleagues, concert with her clique, or joining a new group with a common interest on an activity. People could team up with their friends on any kind of occasions. Despite framing a flow around a specific occasion they could be in, we created 3 user flows “Share/ Invite/ Join” for Team Up based on the aforementioned understanding of the multiple facets to a person’s life. As a result, the three tasks have become Team Up’s primary CTA’s that initiate a face-to-face meet up.

Out of the 3 flows we discovered, we decided to focus on the path of Share. Our rationale is as follow:
1. Share is the primary behavioural engagement to how users currently interacts with the contents they come across; they share post via WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger in the form of a screenshot or url.
2. Share overlaps with Invite as it initiates an invitation.

As mentioned earlier that readers share content via WhatsApp. Important information to help aid decision making such as date & time, venue information, event details and pictures are dispersed among the lines of conversation in the chatroom. Users find themselves frustrated having to scroll through the chat history to refer back to those details. Hence, our concept of Team Up’s Share feature is to help elevate users’ sharing process by creating an instant gratification for them to engage and meet face to face.

Visual Design

After deciding on the design of the new service, we then proceeded to work on the visual design. For the visuals, Team Up is a new feature introduced as a new way to engage users and to leverage Time Out current service, therefore the visuals must be consistent with the brand’s current design.

Moodboard & Styleguide

Prototype Iterations

We prototyped the idea and conducted three rounds of usability testings with five Time Out readers per round. We tested the prototype and conducted the following iterations:

Final Prototype

The final prototype is built using InVision and can be found here.

Conclusion

How did we solve the problem

Although the client had an intention to build a real time communication between users in the Time Out app through the new service, our research found that the users’ behaviour of communication does not support their idea.

Time Out readers are not interested in downloading the application since Time Out website is easily accessible on the web. Asking users to communicate out of their conventional messaging app would mean higher barrier to building engagement (including arranging face-to-face meetings) with their friends as it limits sharing only to people who use Time Out application.

We believe that we are able to integrate real-time communication between users by capitalising on readers’ behavioural convention in which they use WhatsApp as their main communication platform.

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