Indigo
UX design
In this project we wanted to explore the question: How do we give users more control over their online presence?
Projekt scope
- UX design, Academic research
The goal
The goal was to create a space where users could curate how other people have access to them. It needed to be able to take away people’s ability to stalk each other (or “micro-stalk” each other – a term we coined ourselves, micro-stalking refers to the small almost unnoticeable stalking-like actions we engage in, like checking if someone has read your message when you can see they are online or checking if someone’s snapcount goes up). We wanted to create something that allowed you to take care of your mental health without having to delete social media and thereby endangering your social life.
Personas
To gain a better understanding of our users, we combined all our research and identified two personas; Dave and Samantha.
Samantha is typically female and between 18-30. Her favourite social media apps are Instagram, Snapchat and BeReal. Sam doesn’t mind having superficial friendships, and image and status can be very important and something she curates herself. To Samantha, surveillance and stalking on social media is just “the name of the game” – if you want to be on social media you need to accept it, play along and gain the benefits that come with playing the game right.
Dave is a little different. Dave is typically either male or female and in the same age range as Samantha. Dave is most fond of Reddit and Discord, and he mostly uses these to maintain his friendships. Status and image are not important to Dave – on the contrary, he likes to be much more private. For that reason, he is also often uncomfortable with how Samantha uses social media, and he wants to escape the expectations of how to use social media that Samantha sets for him. Dave wants to be more in control of how and who has access to him online, and he is very hesitant to accept online surveillance. Overall, Dave values transparency, being able to customise his experience, and his ability to choose.
We quickly discovered that Dave was our target audience, and thus we designed Indigo with him in mind.
The two things we spent the most time on was the status bar and the modes.
Modes was partly inspired by playlists, specifically on Spotify, and how it is common to curate playlists that adhere to your mood or a specific occasion. Another source of inspiration was “Focus” or “Do not disturb” settings, and we wanted to combine the element of restricting who has access to you at a certain time with the element of different occasions or moods. From these ideas we cam up with modes, which are presets that allows you to set your status on different platforms in correlation with different occasions.
The status bar took several iterations before we got it right. We experimented with different ways to show one’s online status and how the bar should be displayed. Should you be able to minimize it? How much information did we need to include? We tried different ways to show you online status, including a small green circle at the bottom of the social media icon, a completely green background and a green outline.
Project summary:
Indigo is a downloadable client that lets you manage you online status of every type of social media from one place. By using different API’s, Indigo lets you choose what status you want others to see at any time, no matter if you are actually online or not. To make it even easier, we have created Modes. Modes can be described as a hybrid between a Spotify playlist and a “do not disturb” function. You simply choose which apps should be included in the mode, give it a label (such as “work” og “vacation”) and specify what the status of individual apps should be when the mode is activated. You also have the option to set the status of individual apps manually, as well as temporary changes to your modes. With Indigo, you never have to worry about other people seeing your online activity ever again. Regain freedom, peace of mind and control with Indigo.