Over the course of 6 weeks, our group of 5 was challenged to create any novel social experience we wanted that used technology. We first ideated new areas for social experiences and then after many pitches and feedback, we decided to shift to social experiences centered around art. We then conducted and analyzed user surveys based on that idea. After we created a couple of ideas for how to solve problems that were identified in those surveys, we decided on the one that we thought was most promising, our Art Tree idea. Since then, we have conducted 2 prototyping sessions with 18 users each time to test out the feasibility of our idea.

Initially, our group wanted to tackle how to solve social loneliness as a result of the pandemic. We wanted to find a novel way to connect regularly disconnected users through the digital world. Some of the ideas that we proposed were a digital/augmented reality canvas for people to collaborate on drawings, an icebreaker app that allows restaurant tables to “battle”/play games against each other, and a community punch card for sustainable acts.

After getting feedback from both the teaching staff and classmates, we were told that the ideas that we proposed didn’t solve the problem of social loneliness and that the ideas were very disconnected from each other; the ideas didn’t fall under one specific theme. Based on that feedback, our group decided to pivot and focus on collaboration rather than social loneliness. Our topic and motivation became creative collaboration through art. We were inspired by creative social experiments like r/Place that motivated people of all backgrounds to work together to create mind-blowing art. We created two ideas centered around creative collaboration and narrowed it down to one final idea that became our final prototypes.

Many people like to create art in a private space where they can freely embody their sentiments and creativity with full concentration. However, the process of making art can be more fun and productive if many people dynamically work together.

‍For example, a large motivation for our project is from the recent social experiment of r/Place, which successfully brought communities together to make pixel art. And so, we were inspired to explore creative collaboration.

Creative collaboration is a good opportunity for artists to seek inspiration from each other, as people from different backgrounds interpret things and present ideas in their own styles. Even a crude mixing of diverse artworks can be a new form of creativity. Most importantly, gathering people with the same interests with the same goal can quickly foster a sense of belonging to a community. 

Therefore, we want to build a platform that could help people adopt a collaborative form of art production and ensure the collaboration process is exciting and dynamic.

Every day, users around the world are given a simple prompt. Users can pick an art category (drawing, music, writing, etc.) to either start their own piece or branch off of an existing piece (that could have been a branch off someone else’s piece, and so on). People collaborate to create community pieces, which can be liked, commented on, and rewarded. Artists can start or edit a piece at any point of the day while the prompt is still active. After 24 hours, a new prompt is released and the previous day’s contributions are archived. This idea aims to foster inspiration, creativity, collaboration, and community. 

We conducted our first prototype remotely through Zoom. We used FigJam to simulate the drawing and branching process. We divided 18 participants into three groups for 3 prompts to test how people react to different prompts. The first group did a broad prompt of “Pokemon”; the second group did a specific prompt of “Raccoon”; the last group did a very broad prompt of “One tool you would bring if you are teleported to the moon." We spent 5 minutes introducing our idea and demoing our FigJam prototype.

We have received 15 survey responses for this prototyping and some directed feedback from the participants as well as responses in the Zoom chat.

Positive Feedback:

• Generally, people like the timer because it made the prototype become a mini-game. One of the participants mentioned that “timer and limits made for a fun game-like experience”
  
• Although people don’t like working with others based on our initial research, the survey shows that people like the iterative process of creation. On a scale of 1 to 10 (lowest to highest), the lowest rating was a 7, and 7 out of 14 participants reported a 10 out of 10 scores in the survey.

Suggestions:

• The prototype shows how people piggyback on other people's ideas, but people do not collaborate or communicate with each other much in this experience.
• Wanted a way to chat with others as well as to comment on others' drawings
• Wanted us to keep the timer as the main feature because we mentioned getting rid of it in the next prototype
  -In the survey, most participants reported that they want to have the piggyback feature within other forms of art. Out of the 15 responses, 8 people wanted filmmaking, 6 wanted writing, and 7 wanted music.
• Wanted us to keep the timer as the main feature because we mentioned getting rid of it in the next prototype
• In the survey, most participants reported that they want to have the piggyback feature within other forms of art. Out of the 15 responses, 8 people wanted filmmaking, 6 wanted writing, and 7 wanted music.

Feedback from IA Cole:

"I was a little worried about using figma as a prototype (I'm not that familliar with FigJam), but I thought the session went great! You did an amazing job of engaging the students and making it so they WANTED to participate. That is very hard to do. The way you gamified your prototype session made it so that you hopefully were able to see some great social interactions. The timer worked very well to create a sense of urgency, and FigJam made it very easy to quickly start new pieces AND pick up from where others left off. The only thing that I would say is to make sure to clarify what your actual idea is to the audience since the prototype is more of a variation of similar concepts. That way they can be more helpful in providing feedback. Overall, amazing work people!!"

Feedback from TA Emily

"Very interesting idea and great work gaining insights from different sources. However, it is unclear how it differs from the competitors that you identify (particularly, Sketch a Day). Think of ways to connect artists that are unique and that particularly promote engagement over a long time. You can look at examples from other fields, for instance, viral games (but try not to discount the connection between art and creative quality). Also, how can you highlight the collaborative aspect of the experience?"

Big Takeaways:

• Enjoyed the timer aspect
• Wanted another way to express art, through other mediums like writing
• Wanted a revamp of the liking system and a chat feature becasue didn't allow for enough expression

We continued basing our prototype in FigJam for the second round of prototyping. This time, we extended our last prototype by adding new features that were requested from our survey responses:

1. We made the timer the main feature of our model and a prospective default feature in our actual app.

2. We changed our liking system from non-restricted heart stickers to a voting component that is easier to manage and gives a better visualization of like counts.We also scaled up our participant groups to simulate a real application scenario where large numbers of users mingle.

3. We incorporated a chat function that supports both commenting and casual chats for communicating ideas. We imposed a very tight timeframe for commenting during our prototype, but we intend to not put any time constraints in the real app to let users fully utilize opportunities to exchange ideas and collaborate.

4. Most importantly, we introduced a new form of art — writing — to our model. The writing tree works in the same way as the art tree, where users are given a prompt and create a story that others can piggyback off of in later iterations. They are free to modify or insert bits in any part of the previous storylines

Free Discussion Session

• “The writing mode was daunting at the beginning, but once I started to do it, it was surprisingly fun.”
  
• “ Due to the short time range, I just put down whatever pops into my mind and that’s actually good because it’s counter-perfectionism.”
• “Yeah, you just don't get caught up in details.”

Online Survey

• 11 total responses
• 100% responded that the prototype was intuitive
• Most students that were placed in the writing group at first were not keen on the idea, but after trying it out, they enjoyed it, especially since there was a timer
• All students in the drawing group responded that they liked the drawing process alongside the new liking system and chat feature
• Only 1 student said that they preferred being able to react with emotes beyond alike
• Only 1 student said that they preferred being able to react with emotes beyond alike
• ⅔ responded preferring a specific prompt and ⅓ responded preferring an open-ended prompt
• Some users weren't aware of the prompt because it wasn't made clear
• 90% responded that 2 minutes was just the right amount of time to create
• Most students don’t like the idea of an unlimited timer since people would take too long and be less inclined to collaborate or motivated to finish the art piece
• Time crunch creates pressure to get something out and fewer thoughts of perfectionism (Fun and enjoyable to have a time crunch)
• Some users lost track of where the prompt was
• Users wanted the chat feature from round 1 but when added -> didn't use very much
• Users wanted even more ways to collabprate such as forming teams with other people, etc

Feedback from IA Cole

"Good job team! I was looking forward to this prototype!I really like the addition of writing this time.It is very clear that your team has taken the time to think about HOW the users are going to interact with your product.I know everyone had a great time and it was a fun way to close out the class :)Overall, great timing, explanations, and moderation of the whole thing. It is starting to feel very refined!"

Big Takeaways

• Have a clearer display of prompt
• Individual chat feature for each art piece
• Liked timer aspect(probably shouldn't have non-timer mode)
• Liked getting inspiration from other artworks
• Responses showed that people loved the interaction part of the prototype through collaboration
• Majority of responses like the chat feature and liking system
• Want additional ways to collaborate such as being able to work on an art piece together or forming teams to create art together

We were then tasked in the final couple days to create a mockup of what our potential application could look like. We decided to design it for tablet first and with more time, we would also develop what it would look like on phones but we wanted to try first on tablet because there was more screen real estate to work with. Below are a few screens of what the drawing tab of the app might include and how they operate.

Throughout our ideation phase, we found that it was difficult to create ideas around our first topic of motivation. Through feedback and discussion, we decided to pivot from social loneliness to social collaboration in order for a more successful second round of ideation. Once we had that motivation and brainstormed initial ideas, we found that there were major competitors; we had to find a way to differentiate our idea from our competitors by utilizing feedback from our surveys and interviews. Overall, user feedback played a tremendous part in guiding the creation and refinement of our prototypes for making a novel social experience.

In our prototyping, we found that people had fun in the iterative and collaborative creation process when they develop other people's ideas; this way, people could also learn how to develop their own initial ideas in a fun way. We found that slightly altering our prototype by adding a timer was successful after the first run-through and getting feedback from that. The timer limited the feeling of perfectionism by making participants show their imperfect work to others; the time crunch created a pressure that restrained perfectionism. Through this feature, participants were also more willing to show their initial ideas to others to receive critique.

In the limited time we were given, we could not pursue and test all of the features we came up with. Below is a list of potential next we could have taken if given more time:
‍‍
Consider adding a forum for people to interact and find others with similar interests

• Look into incorporating additional art forms (music, video editing, etc.)
• Design a layout of the actual app and perform user tests
• ‍Consider more direct collaboration modes to help artists work together
• Being able to form teams/groups to work on a piece 
• Allow users to use different forms of art to piggyback the ideas
• For example, if someone drew an art piece, someone would be able to branch off but write a story around it
• Consider adding a forum for people to interact and find others with similar interests
• Allow different time options (2min, 5min, 10min, 1hr, unlimited, etc.)
• Consider adding a forum for people to interact and find others with similar interests