Who's IN App & Plugin
GOAL
As the Conversation as a Platform domain Lead, i worked on multiple bot and conversation scenarios/usecases. We identified multiple conversation patterns across platforms and decided to pick this scenario of event creation and planning on a messaging platform. Our goal was to make event creation and planning easy, helping friends agree on which restaurant/movie or local place to go to.
That’s why we built the Who’s In iMessage App – it’s search meets group consensus-building. With Who’s In, you can find activities with Bing, suggest times to meet, and then sit back and relax as your friends vote for the best option – all from within your group conversation on iMessage.
INITIAL EXPLORATIONS
I went through multiple iterations mapping the interaction flows. Our goal being:
- Solve for a need that is currently inefficient (Group context not easily solved in apps)
- Optimize for iMessage but be functional across platforms
- Err on less functionality but easier to use
The initial use-cases which needed to be tackled by the imessage plugin were as follows:
- What Time? - When are most people free for a hike?
- Who’s In? - I’m going to happy hour at El Gaucho, who’s in?
- Which One? - Which movie do you want to go to out of these?
FINAL IMESSAGE APP UI MODEL
After going through multiple iterations of trying to simplify the process of event picking/creation and sharing we landed on the final version as shown below. This model was intuitive and allowed the user to go through the event creation model in a usable and simplified format.
Based on usability studies and initial user feedback we incorporated the Custom activity flow in the app. This ended up being the most used feature of the imessage plugin and the cross platforms apps we created later.
SCALING WHO'S IN TO OTHER PLATFORMS
After launching the iMessage plugin we mapped the flow to stand alone apps as so that we can make it work cross platform.
