Design Process
Sharing hard-to-realize dreams and get suggestions in collaborative Q&A community.
Kan Yu, Xiaoyu Ji, Hengjuan Qian, Jun Zhang, and me
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Balsamiq Wireframes, Axure
Team lead, UX designer, UX researcher and prototyper
Sep. 2013 - Jan. 2014
DreamHatcher is a collaborative Q&A e-community in which people can share the dreams that they can't realized by themselves with others and receive professional suggestions towards specific questions.
The platform helps solve the problem that people are too shy to share their hard-to-realize dreams and it facilitates the communication between the people who have similar dreams.
The approach of crowdsourcing makes DreamHatcher a better knowledge management system, so people get the access to solutions quickly and achieve dreams collaboratively. This is a project for CHI 2013 Student Design Competition.
In our initial survey, we raised 15 questions that were classified by three key points: general questions of dreams, questions of dream sharing and questions of contribution to others' dreams.
This survey had 199 successful respondents, and we gathered a few valuable findings that are stated below:
Based on 288 affinity notes collected from six interviews, we created an affinity wall. Findings led to many design ideas on our platform, and they also informed our personas.
Some people are open to share different types of dreams with tags. Sharing dreams on our platform can inspire other people, seek suggestions, mitigate depression and find matches. The tags on dreams can lead other users to their dreams easily.
Dreams are subjective, most are long-term. The excitement of fulfilling one’s dream can motivate him or her.
Some people prefer to receive notifications for their dreams and suggestions while they will not update dreams except some certain circumstances, such as when other users having demands or they need to refine their dreams.
Some people do not have intent to check their dreams frequently unless they are reminded about their dreams, or the dreams are interesting or providing useful information.
Common interests and knowledge, friendship, inner happiness and desire of helping others are primary motivations of providing suggestions to other people’s dreams.
Some people prefer selecting practical suggestions by themselves. They would like to give positive feedbacks to suggestions, but they refuse to receive any offensive suggestions.
The system should not only be entertaining but also be professional. People use this system could find their understanding of the life. Also, the system should let user use searching engine to find interesting ideas.
Some people do not care whether the person they help knows their social identities as long as the system does not expose their real identities.
Some people prefer to have the communication section of system to contain face to face element because it helps them feel intimate and provide instant feedbacks, but they don’t prefer the format of Wikipedia for searching because it is unreliable.
We created a behavioral map to better understand patterns of our interviewees. We identified ten high-level behavioral variables that might guide our final design. Based on results gathered from our contextual inquiry, we placed each individual interviewee along a spectrum for each variable. Two major clusters of behavior directly led to our two personas.
We got our design inspiration from several goal sharing and troubleshooting websites, such as Quora, WikiHow and Kickstarter. We want to provide a platform in which users can post their dreams and adopt suggestions from others. Therefore users can share their professional knowledge and skills.
We started with 12 sketches for brainstorming, then we narrowed down to 5 ideas for further exploring, which led to low-fi, mid-fi and high-fi prototypes.
This is a walkthrough video for the mid-fi prototype.
(Unmute the video to hear the narrative)
In order to revise our prototypes iteratively, we conducted usability testing to evaluate the platform’s feasibility, functionality and interface design. We took participants’ reflections into consideration and applied several adjustments to prototypes.
We plan to expand the target users in the coming future by integrating online and offline activities. Further studies regarding people’s motivation of sharing their wisdom could help us encourage people to provide more high-quality suggestions. Improving our discover feature to recommend good dreams to a particular user should also be taken into our consideration. Over all, we believe that DreamHatcher can not only help people clarify the process of achieving their dreams but also satisfy the needs of self-actualization.