MindMii
Talk calmly, when you're ready.
Drew King, Lee Janzen, Christoph Bendix
Talk calmly, when you're ready.
Drew King, Lee Janzen, Christoph Bendix
Team
Drew King
(They/Them)
Lee Janzen-Morel
(They/Them)
Christoph Bendix
(He/Him)
Problem and Design Overview
Forgetting to reply for too long can harm our relationships or make us miss urgent deadlines.
MindMii helps you go beyond reading text messages to replying
Missed communication poses a real problem for people who use smartphones with real costs. Not only do people feel disconnected; missed messages can seriously strain relationships. It can be frustrating for both parties and leave all people involved wondering what went wrong. This issue is exacerbated by the nuanced nature of digital communication. The ideal timing of our responses is influenced by various factors including: the closeness of our relationships, urgency of the matter, and proximity to each other.
Design Research Process and Key Insights
This design project concept came from a need within our social circles for better digital communication management and habits. In these circles, we identified those most impacted people who identify as neurodivergent, overbooked, or who manage long-distance connections spanning accross time zones. The goal of this design research is to uncover contributing factors that create increased communication assistance needs, while also seeking potential patterns in digital communication habits. This is accomplished by learning more about the lived experiences of those who struggle with digital communication, and uncover additional needs across different participant groups. Exploring the communication needs of others in an open ended way allows us to avoid oversights and assumptions that could be made while moving forward with the design process.
Brenda is a high-profile corporate strategist known for navigating the fast-paced world of business with precision.
Ava is a talented graphic designer with a flair for creativity and a diagnosis of ADHD.
Methodology
Six individuals struggling with messaging responses were interviewed to explore their texting habits. Three of these individuals participated in three-day contextual inquiries, detailing their past month's texting history. The other three participated in a three-day anonymous diary study. From the data gathered, distinct themes were identified and two unique personas were created to represent the most common needs of our participants:
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Brenda: Overlooks small tasks amidst a busy schedule.
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Ava: Needing messaging support due to neurodivergence.
Our research helped us to identify key insights, allowing us to frame specific needs of participants and factors causing communication issues the participants were facing with digital communication. Three of these key insights were:
Response anxiety prevents responses
Ava has a tendency to find social interactions stressful, which significantly influences the speed of their responses, especially in less-close connections where the social dynamic is less clear. This situation causes Ava to experience messaging response uncertainty, especially when faced with open-ended questions where there are many possible responses.
Balancing "real-life" tasks and digital tasks is a challenge
Brenda struggles with the overwhelming demands of her busy schedule. Brenda's daily tasks, including chores, errands, work, school, healthcare, and social engagements, often take precedence. These competing priorities affect her ability to respond promptly. Ava also struggled to find a balance between the demands of their daily schedule and prioritizing responses to messages in a timely manner.
Previous read-but-unaddressed notifications are often ignored
Both Ava and Brenda would swipe away message notifications if they appeared at an inconvenient time. This often resulted in forgetting to respond to the message later because the message was now stashed away under a stack of "unread" messages that are diffcult to sort through.
Participant Selection Process and Rationale
A journal study and contextual inquiry were performed to understand the communication habits of our participants. The participants were selected based on their unique communication needs and experiences. The participants were selected from three groups: neurodivergent individuals, people with international connections, and those who are overbooked. These groups were selected based on the unique communication needs of each group and the potential insights they could provide.
Journal Study
Our participants included members of The Huskies for Neurodiversity student group, a group comprised of UW students and faculty identifying as neurodivergent or allies, which connects to our project focus. The Huskies for Neurodiversity group has a discord server that Drew is a part of, which facilitated recruiting and studying instant messaging practices in neurodiverse populations in a remote diary study.
Another source of journal study participants was people who have long-distance/international connections, informing us about their unique communication needs. Studying the experiences of people with international connections provides insights into the complexities of cross-cultural communication and how time zone differences contribute to missed responses. This group had the lowest participation in our diary study, despite coordinated recruitment efforts.
Our choice of a journal study aligns with the preferences of the neurodivergent community, allowing a more comfortable way of providing research data that is accessible for those with auditory processing issues. We requested participants provide detailed emotional analyses of their interactions in the diary study, providing further context to observed messaging habits.
Contextual Inquiry
Participants from our social circles who face overbooking were selected for contextual inquiry because a member of the research team had access to this group by proximity. We define overbooking as those who have overwhelmingly busy schedules and high communication needs for both work and personal lives. This group represents a diverse range of individuals with busy lives spanning various age groups. Studying their messaging habits has potential to reveal the impact of overbooked schedules on response times, response rates, and specific circumstances that contribute to forgetting to reply for this population.
The contextual inquiry approach was used to observe day-to-day mobile phone use, more clearly define habits, issues, and uncover areas of the participant experience that may not be self-disclosed. Contextual inquiries, along with jounral studies informed the development of our two personas. These personas supported and informed our iterative design process.
Iterative Design Process and Key Insights
The second revision of the paper prototype, including clearer signifiers for notifications and help available earlier in the messaging process.
We explored solutions based on our research to develop MindMii, a mobile app and companion watch app. These paper prototypes focus on two primary tasks supporting message management and remembering to respond. These two tasks are:
- Easily identify and respond to missed messages
- Respond to a message in an appropriate amount of time
Our iterative design process included usability testing, heuristic evaluation, and an additional round of usability testing. The paper prototype was effective in testing our design and identifying some of the most severe issues. The result of this process is rapid testing and revision process.
In our first paper prototype people found it hard to understand how to interact with MindMii because it did not follow conventions of instant messaging platforms participants were familiar with. An issue that came up in our second paper prototype is clarity around the availability of features earlier in the messaging flow. A digital mockup was created from the earlier iterations, providing context for improvement by iterative revision.
Our iterative design process revealed key insights which supported continued design improvement. Three of these key insights were:
The first image shows the original paper prototype alongside the second image which is the final paper prototype where the notification ring indicates it is a MindMii reminder with a logo present.
The watch notifications needed more clarity of design and interactivity
An issue identified from user testing was confusion about how to interact with the watch notification, which appears as a color ring without any context. This confusion was identified by participant feedback during paper prototype testing. The participant did not understand what to do with the color ring and was not sure what interactions, if any, it supports. The participant also found it unclear if this was a notification at all. To provide clarity, we added a bell icon to the color ring which provides a signifier to people using MindMii to indicate that this is a notification, following conventions in this design space.
The first image shows the original paper prototype and the second image is the final paper prototype where urgent is marked in plaintext for better clarity and the contact name is included for context.
During each of our three user tests, we received questions regarding the style used to indicate an urgent massage. For the final paper prototype, we decided to use words, due to a lack of conventions regarding color coding notifications and to provide a lower barrier of entry for people new to MindMii.
Iterating over the design for assisting with responses. The initial design had pre-generated responses, but the final design allows for a person to input via a prompt to compose a response that meets their needs.
Suggestive features should provide more types of help
The original suggestive response feature only provided messaging suggestions and did not provide other types of help, an issue uncovered during a paper prototype interaction with participants. Our participants found this issue when they performed the task of "identifying and responding to a missed message". The participant wanted send a different message than the options provided by MindMii's suggestive text. This issue was solved by expanding our suggestive text helper to one that provides general help features by accepting a prompt and allowing for regeneration of suggestions using generative AI.
By offering response assistance outside of opening a message we reduce some response anxiety that is caused by fear of 'leaving someone on read.'
More action options should be provided in more places.
The initial MindMii prototype's message response interface focused heavily on replying without offering other options such as accessing help or suggestions. This was an issue uncovered through paper prototype testing by participants. The ability to access features like help was buried too deeply in our design, requiring too many clicks to access, and needed to be hoisted into the earlier phases of the interaction. Participant feedback suggested that more types of help should be provided in addition to AI suggestions. We added assistive buttons to the text screen to provide help as an alternative to drafting a response.
Resulting Design
Task: Easily identify and respond to missed messages
Step 1: Mobile app is opened.
Step 2: Missed message selected.
Step 3: Unsure how to reply, so AI message selected.
Step 4: AI offers a suggested message reply.
Step 5: Suggestion is selected, populates to text.
When crafting the digital mockup, another design iteration was performed based on feedback sessions with the paper prototype. The AI Message feature is more prominently featured on both mobile and watch versions of MindMii.
The message hub now follows conventions from iOS and watchOS, notably the watch app no longer has a scroll wheel around the edge. Urgency is now conveyed via orange text and an orange exclamation mark on the watch. These changes were identified as ways to follow better watch design conventions, since following design conventions from Android confused co-design participants due to a lack of exposure to these products.
Task: Respond to a Message in an Appropriate Amount of Time
Initially, there is an urgent message notification, but it is snoozed because of other pressing tasks demanding the user's attention.
After a brief period, the AI detects that the message has a sensitive response deadline. The alert appears again after five minutes. Both the AI and the user acknowledge the urgency of the message, prompted by the reminder.
The user taps on the contact icon within the notification to access the message. Upon entering the reply mode, they notice an option for the suggestive AI message composition feature. The user selects this option.
Using the keyboard, the user drafts a response to the message. Upon completion, they hit "send", delivering the response directly using the messaging platform from which the original message originated.
Examining our other task to respond to a message in an appropriate amount of time, our scenario has MindMii notifying the user of an urgent message from earlier that needs a reply soon. The user decides to snooze the message since they are busy, but the app AI recognizes this message is time-sensitive and limits the snooze to five minutes. Following this, it re-prompts the user about this message and they realize the urgency of the message.
The user opens the message and enters into reply mode. AI is there to support with suggestions, but the user composes a message of their own using the keyboard and presses send. The response is routed to the platform the message is native to. The notification is cleared from the lock screen. Messages are no longer forgotten with MindMii!
Conclusion and Next Steps
MindMii is designed to be a powerful companion app that helps users manage their messaging habits and respond to messages in a timely manner. The app is designed to help users who struggle with messaging responses due to a variety of factors, including neurodivergence, overbooking, and long-distance connections. MindMii provides users with the tools they need to respond to messages in a timely manner, reducing response anxiety and helping users maintain healthy relationships.
Further development of MindMii will focus on building an interactive digital prototype in Figma for more user testing. This will allow us to gather more feedback on the app's design and functionality, and make any necessary adjustments before moving forward with development. We will also conduct additional user testing to ensure that the app is accessible and easy to use for all users. Our goal is to create an app that is intuitive, user-friendly, and effective in helping users manage their messaging habits and respond to messages effectively in a timely manner.