Hobbees

Problem Statement

How can we allow people to upskill their hobbies, share their knowledge, and have fun with a community of people with shared interests?

Interface Design for Learning & Social Media

Site mapping, moodboards, wireframing, and prototyping

Role
Project Manager & UX Designer

Year
2022

What is Hobbees?

Have you ever wanted to learn a new hobby? Or wanted to find community with one of your interests? Have you ever attended a group class to learn how to knit, sew, paint, build or plant? Hobbees offers all of this! 

Hobbees is a mobile app that allows users to find community, share their knowledge, and upskill in their hobbies. Developed as part of a Tufts University design final project, Hobbees was created by the Propolis Team to help users get to learning, sharing, and creating rather than getting caught in a complicated interface. 

Defining Our Initial Goals

As we started the design process, our team identified an initial goal for what Hobbees could be:

We want to let users focus on learning new hobbies rather than learning to use the interface. 

As we got started, we considered how this could be accomplished and how users may interact with the interface.

Limitations

This project would have greatly benefitted from in depth user research to guide our decisions, such as interviews, task analysis, and diary studies from people who are experts and beginners to their respective hobbies. However, we were only given a few weeks to complete this assignment, so many of our design decisions were made based on feedback from our clients (professors). 

Initial Concept Development

We created 2 primary concepts and wireframes to compare as options for how the interface could look, which we shared with our clients for their review. The first concept had an emphasis on small-scale live classes, which would focus on smaller communities and building cohorts, and the second concept was structured more like YouTube or TikTok, allowing users to watch videos or join live sessions in real-time. 

Concept 1: Small-Scale Live Classes

Concept 2: Social Media live Sessions & Videos On-Demand

Defining the Brand: Moodboards

After determining structure with our conceptual low-fidelity wireframes, we developed 3 moodboards for our clients to choose the visual language that they want the interface to have. We consulted platforms like Dribble and Pinterest for inspiration and examples of colors and interfaces. 

Selection: We chose Concept 2 because it is engaging and bright. It clearly embodies Hobbees brand direction and will inspire aspiring young artists and creators visually, while still keeping the interface clear and easy to use. 

Final High-Fidelity Mock-Ups

To see the designs in action, use the button to view the prototype!

Concluding Thoughts

Our designs enabled users to connect with others, form community, grow their hobbies and skills, and share their expertise with others. Incorporating bright colors and a hexagonal motif, the hobbies brand is fun, collaborative, and bright.

Looking Back: Room for Improvement

We did not get a chance to conduct preliminary user research due to time constraints and were largely at the whim of our sponsors. As someone with a UX design and research background, it pains me to see designs created without any human feedback or user testing. If we were to do this again with more time, I would want to do a preliminary literature review, user interviews, a diary study, create a journey map, and conduct usability tests on our final designs.

  • Literature review: In order to understand the problem space, I would want to know what hobbies are most popular, where and how they currently learn and teach them, and how communities around hobbies currently exist and how they are formed. By doing this research, I would be informed as I dug more into how Hobbees could fit into this ecosystem. 

  • User interviews: Following my literature review, I would want to conduct interviews to validate my findings and dig more into how people feel about the overall process: what they like and where they have pain points. This would allow me to get a holistic view of how learning or teaching a hobby works. 

  • Diary study: Since learning a hobby does not take place in one sitting, I would conduct a diary study with teachers and students of different hobbies to learn more about their experiences and the specific pitfalls and steps that go into learning different hobbies and connecting with other people who are involved in that hobby.

  • Journey map: With my findings, I would create a journey map to understand where Hobbees could fit into or enhance the experience of learning or teaching a hobby. 

  • Usability tests: Following my designs, I would want to ensure that our designs are helpful to users and easy to use! By conducting these usability tests, we would have been able to gather feedback from end-users and iterate on our designs to make them even better.

However, there were a few places where we could have improved in our research process and accessible design:

The designs that we created are bright and colorful, but we did not compare them to any accessibility standards to find out if they were compliant. Given more time and what I know now, I wish that we had used a color contrast checker and ensured that our designs were generally compliant with Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act and web accessibility standards such as WCAG.