Completed Tasks

Desktop Designs

Person Responsible: Enoch, Chem

Due Date: Jan 15

We are finalizing our desktop designs. In many cases we are just increasing font, margin, and spacing by 1.5. The goal is to maintain the same look, feel, and experience. The main interactive difference involves adding hover effects that aren't possible on mobile. Unlike many social media services, like instagram, we want our desktop view to be as intuitive and functional as our mobile version.

High Fidelity Testing

Person(s) Responsible: Gavin, Max

Due Date: Jan 8

• The onboarding steps had some confusing language that broke up the experience a bit. We want to make sure that there is no room for confusing in this language, we will revise it for clarity.

• The current friction modal might lack impact, while our users agree with it in concept, in practice most users said they don't imagine it being very effective. Some users even said they don't imagine there will be an opportunity for doomscrolling considering the nature of the app, making it obsolete. We will include this in our first beta version and test it live to determine if it is necessary.

• Users embraced the idea of having comments with those you are not connected with appear under an anonymous user. This could allow for important context without compromising privacy or performance.

  • One user suggested having the ability to request to see who an anonymous user is (should they want to connect, or just know who they are talking to). Giving agency of privacy and digital connection to the user.

• The Emoji Reaction Experience still leaves a lot to be desired - users were confused where to react. A lot thought the already-reacted emojis were quick reactions instead. We need to revisit the design here.

• There was a lot of confusion on the difference and purpose of posting to your feed and posting to your profile. They were in different spots, and at points accomplished the same function and at points didn't. rather then making the user choose whether a post goes to profile or the feed by having two different post buttons in two different place, we are going to change our strategy to having one post button and a toggle at the end that allows the user to save the post to their profile.

• There is more work to be done in explaining and intuitively designing branches, not every user understood how they function entirely. Once explained they appreciated the feature, we just need to bridge that gap between understanding and interaction a little better.

• Another user suggested that we make the profile a little more customizable. They wanted the ability to reorder the profile items to the way they see fit.

New Feed post-card

Person(s) Responsible: Chem

Due Date: Jan 15

We are updating the post card view to be more visually appealing and improve specific experiences:-

• Condensing the title and caption into one block

• Rearranging the emoji reaction experience

• Improving the entry point for comments to be more intuitive.

Back-end Functionality

Person(s) Responsible: Ella, Max

Due Date: Jan 15

We are working on finalizing the back-end functionality for our web-app. We want to make sure everything functions so that the only things left to do is develop the design and interactions.

Post-in-feed life span Discovery

Person(s) Responsible: Gavin

Due Date: Jan 15

I found articles and studies that will be used to inform how long a post should live on the feed within Loam based on how long posts receive interaction on certain platforms. One study focused on people’s post tendencies on WeChat which encourages limiting who sees your posts and how long they can see it for which was pretty helpful, they studied 21 people for 15 days and found that they post an average of 3 times a day when sharing to only close friends or family and they tend to use the option that only lets people see it for 3 days.

After studying millions of posts on Reddit, In summary, while information can hop between networks in minutes, its active lifespan is largely confined to the first 12 to 24 hours, after which new interactions become negligible. On Facebook, for younger users (ages 18–30), the average lifespan of a post, the point at which engagement peaks, is approximately 7 hours but some interaction continues until about hour 50. On instagram the interaction happens much quicker in the first few hours of a post but has a slightly longer lifespan with an average of 55 hours before interaction completely drops off.