Link

During our team’s research process for Keynect, we had a lot of great insights from surveys, interviews, and participatory design workshops. While our research helped drive our final iteration of Keynect, our team made decisions early on in the ideation phase to narrow our design focus. Link was a personal project of mine, which is an alternative solution to some of the early research we gathered.

Link is a social media platform designed for close groups of friends or family members. It helps these groups give an insight into each other’s daily lives. Similar to services like Find My Friends and Squarespace, Link uses phone mapping services to show selected people where you are and have been. Unlike these two services, Link has a social feed that can give a peek into the lives of friends and family when they are far away. While the app is designed to be a subtle way of staying connected, it’s can be a great tool for prompting conversations.

Key research from Keynect:

It’s the little things: In long distance relationships, people tend to update each other with major life events, but they miss sharing small moments together.

Relationships shouldn’t be a chore: participants sought subtle ways of staying connected to each other to supplement existing forms of direct communication. 

Personalized gestures are the best: While social media can help people stay connected, they aren’t as meaningful when messages or posts are sent to large groups of people.

Designing the dashboard

Cards at the top of the dashboard show where people in your network are at the moment. The key information displayed on the social feed are the person(s), action, location, and time. I wanted to use friendly language to describe actions such as “shopped” when the location has been identified as a place for shopping. Colloquial language is really important for this app to help minimize the role of the app and emphasize human-to-human interactions in a relationship.

Designing the map

Users can use the map to see a live look at where people are. Unlike the dashboard view, the map is particularly useful to see the proximity and relative location of your network. The scrolling cards at the bottom can be used to highlight and locate a specific person.

Designing the location system

From the research we gathered, participants felt that technology can often dehumanize interactions. The option to nickname commonly visited places in tandem with friendly language in the social feed makes interactions feel more personal.