INSIGHT
Speaking in front of a crowd can be a frightening experience for many, in fact 3 out of 4 adults suffer from speech anxiety. Despite this fact, many make public speaking their career as CEOs, politicians, or performers all over the world. With career success or political success on the line, communication and feedback from audiences prove vital for accurate assessments to be made and these communication gaps bridged.
To combat these problems, we propose an app called Insight for speakers to build public speaking skills and to assist them with audience feedback, which would allow speakers like politicians the ability to make informed decisions and help audiences feel they have a voice in the crowd. Insight adds further value by letting the user catlogue past speeches to learn from previous events and track their progress with a scoring system.
THE PROJECT
ABOUT
Groups were formed based on common interests. My group had an interest in increasing political participation
Through our research, we decided it would be better to attack the problem from a new direction. Instead of helping only political events, we could help communication with any event.
DURATION
This was a college based project and so approximately 2-3 months of the semester. Roughly 16 - 20 hours.
ROLE
My role in this project included the following:
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Initial ideation & surveys
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Sketches & wireframes
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User testing 1 & 2
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Storyboard animatic
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Ideation
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Invision prototyping
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Final slide designs
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Final UI design
RESEARCH
SURVEYS
Through our surveys and research we found these common factors about why political participation is at an all time low.
What we learned:
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People didn't have time for politics.
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People didn't care to get involved.
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Accuracy of information has led to distrust.
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People don't feel like their voice is heard.
INTERVIEWS
We were able to speak to a few local political leaders.
What we learned:
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Politicians struggle the most with getting appropriate feedback at the right time.
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They struggle with participation.
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They don't hear enough of the things people like/approve of. They mainly just hear about the things people disapprove of.
THE PROBLEM
Early on we saw a lot of potential issues with just focusing on politics. Which is why we decided to switch our focus to help communication with any event.
GOALS
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Create an app that has an easy communicatin platform for both the presenter and the audience.
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Give live event data to the presenters.
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Get feedback through facial recognition technology and through comments.
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Have a video archive of events for the presenters.
FLOW CHART & SYSTEM MODEL
USER LOGS IN > SYNCS DEVICE > SHARES LIVE STREAM WITH OTHERS > VIEW LIVE STREAM > ENDS LIVE STREAM > VIEW RESULTS
USER: Speaker sets up and prepares for an event.
SPEAKING EVENT: The sensor is placed at a speaking event and then the sensor begins to gather facial data.
LIVE DASHBOARD: Facial reaction data is displayed for the speaker's use.
IDEATION
WIREFRAMES
ROUGH UI
PROTOTYPE
MOCKUP
Using Sketch to create each screen, we then used InVision to bring it all together for the prototype.
USER TESTING
15 MINUTE MODERATE TEST
We did short moderate tests with 6 different users. This provided us qualitative data and gave us a quick user perspective about the app.
Positive:
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Almost everyone understood the concept of the app and what it does.
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Most felt like the app overall was easy to navigate and transitions were smooth.
Negative:
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All the users didn't understand the video share section.
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The way the scores were displayed for the speeches confused people.
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The profile page looked too similar to the Dashboard.
FINAL DESIGN
Based on the feedback that we had received from our user testing, we now had a better idea on what we needed to improve.
CORE FEATURES
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Fast sync to device
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Share live stream
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Live feed of audience feedback
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Communication through messaging feature.
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View past events
FINAL PROTOTYPE
You can view the final prototype HERE
CONCLUSION
TAKE AWAY
I think this app idea has a lot of potential. The technology for facial recognition is till fairly new but as it progresses the more information it could give the performers. I still think it could also help with local politics. If there was one place to go to for everything going on in your state, it could help increase participation.
CHALLENGES
There were a number of challenges with this project. I think because our professor was trying to teach us multiple UX concepts that didn't really add to the app experience and it took up time that could have been spent on working on the UI and overall app functions. There were times too that there was confusion within my own group on who was working on what.
WHAT I WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY
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I felt like our UI design struggled. We should have put more effort into making all the designs look more cohesive and professional.
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We had to do a video of our storyboard. Which was great to learn but took away time from working on the app itself with the short amount of time we had.
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We should have talked to professional performers and asked what they thought of the app and what they would want in it.
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I think there should have been more rounds of prototyping and user testing.