How WhatsApp can improve work life balance among digital nomads

The challenge

The brief was to choose an existing written communication app and come up with ideas on how to improve it

The process

I decided to take on this project with a human centered, design thinking approach. I had many ideas from the very beginning on how certain apps could be optimized, but after doing user research and emphasizing with my target group, I soon realised that what they needed was something entirely different than I first had in mind.

Emphasising with users

The target group I decided to design for was digital nomads, young professionals who are working remotely while travelling and exploring different places in the world. First off I prepared and scheduled semi structured interviews with five digitals nomads, all of them currently living in Bali, Indonesia. The goal with the interviews was to find out about their general smartphone communication habits. I mostly asked open questions, and let them speak freely about their current habits, trying to drop all my assumptions and previous ideas on solutions.

Since WhatsApp is by far the most used app in my target group, it made sense to move forward looking into how to improve it in this project. One of the more interesting insights I gained during the interviews was that almost all of the persons use WhatsApp for communicating with personal contacts and with business contacts and clients. This was quite unexpected to me. 

Based on the insights I gained I created a persona, Adam Meyer, and a journey map describing how he uses WhatsApp throughout a typical day in his life.

Defining the design challenge

After spending time getting to know my target group and their needs, it had become quite obvious to me that one of the major challenges they were facing was how to separate between private and work related conversations.

It not only made them struggle to navigate and find different conversations it even inflicted on their work life balance. As Joel, one of the persons I interviewed, put it; “The worst thing is when I stopped working for the day and my clients in Europe start sending me messages that I don’t want to think about when I’m off having a beer with friends”.

This led me to defining the design challenge into “How can WhatsApp improve work life balance among digital nomads?”

Ideation

Next phase was to generate ideas on how to solve the design challenge. In order to come up with as many diverse ideas as possible I did a SCAMPER brainstorming session. The session resulted in many ideas, from which I chose two that seemed the most interesting to me:

1. Adapt the list of conversations. Let users separate it into different folders that could be Work, Private, or any other category.
2. Combine with AirBnB’s functionality to switch between “Traveller and Host” within the same account. In WhatsApp the function would allow users to switch between Private and Work.

Prototyping

I decided to prototype both ideas - testing two different variants would allow users to compare and give more detailed feedback during the upcoming user tests.

First off I started doing simple prototypes on paper. I did a few versions before I moved onto creating high fidelity clickable prototypes in Figma. I used screen shots and modified them by adding the new functionality - Making them look as close to the real app as possible.

You can view the clickable Figma prototype here.

Testing

I performed user tests with the five people I previously had interviewed. I let them use the two different prototypes and gave them tasks to perform. While using the prototypes the users were asked to describe what’s happening and what they are thinking and feeling. It was interesting to find out that most of the users actually suggested that they would have preferred both solutions combined, rather than just one of them. 

It also became obvious that there are many other things to consider, such as how to avoid new messages to be hidden in folders or in a separate account. If I was to continue working on this project, one of the next steps would definitely be to design the whole user flow in greater detail.

Learnings

During this project I definitely learnt the importance of emphasising with users and defining the design problem, what I am trying to solve. It was also a great learning experience to practise how to perform user interviews and user tests.