Connect people over shared interests on locally trending topics
Banter is a product that my partners and myself wish to have had when we met in graduate school in 2013. I was a graduate student who just came to the U.S. from China. One of my partners was a American student who had a deep connection with China. We witnessed the disconnection between international and domestic students on campus. We saw plenty of American students who had strong interests in foreign culture and language but had very few opportunity to interact with students from those countries. It is a mutually beneficial opportunity for both sides and siloed minority groups on campus have become a bigger and bigger issue for the university administrators.
As the designer and product owner, I am responsible for the branding and overall experience of Banter.
Banter went through 2 major phases. It started off as a language learning app for language learners (foreign students who want to improve their English and American students who want to learn their second and third languages). As our “beachhead” market, we were not able to gain much momentum among the domestic students for various reasons. In 2018, we pivoted to a new direction, a social app that connects students in real-time based on their geo-location and shared interests over locally trending topics. Banter was launched in the fall of 2018.
We are now re-examining our market position and explore a new concept, Banter Zone.
Please visit our website to learn more about Banter: https://www.banterlanguage.com
A language learning app
Wireframe demonstrates main user flows. This wireframe is used for initial user research and concept validation.
Banter 1.0 was designed in a 3 day sprint with a group of CS students who had no iOS development experience before. The design has kept everything simple and conventional so that the developers can leverage existing open sourced frameworks and templates.
We used this prototype mainly for initial market validation, pitches to investors and user research purposes.
A social app for authentic in-person interactions
Interaction Design
The trending topic system is the backbone of Banter 2.0 Using a topic classification system, we users will see a curated list of topics near them. Users will be connected if they swipe on the same topic during a defined time window and also in each other’s vicinity.
We had an experienced iOS developer joining the team and more possibilities for fun and engaging UX. I spent a lot of time on designing the topic swiping interaction which we view as a key part of the experience.
This example shows you two micro-interactions for the swiping behaviour. We went through some A/B testing with students and got very positive feedback for the one on the right.
However, we didn’t eventually get to implement it before the launch.
Revise design to increase engagment
After the launch, we received a lot of feedback on the UX. We conducted 2 usability testing sessions with 10 users. One of the main usability issue was the topic creation process. In the initial design, to create a topic, you need to swipe right to your profile page and then click on the “Create a Topic” button. We were not expecting average users to create topics frequently. However, we failed to anticipate that our early adopters are all enthusiastic about the new app and wanted to capture intereting moments on campus and share with the others as a “topic”. We want to maintain the quality of the content and collect enough meta data to contribute to the recommendation model.
However, we soon realized that all these impediments resulted in a low number of trending topics created everyday. We soon revised our design to simplify the topic creation process and saw a significant increase in daily topic creation number.
In 2019, we are working on a new feature called Banter Zone! Banter zone is an extension of our effort to support face-to-face interactions. It is designed for hosting and joining nearby meet-ups at anytime. Here’s a sneak peak at what to expect. Support Banter by visiting our website or contact me for more details.