aepistle
A New Kind of Social Media
Project Overview
Designed to cultivate a new social media climate aepistle is catered to writers and truth seekers invested in facilitating authentic interactions while fostering social unity on the web. As social unity their north star, aepistle is focused on creating a platform for communities who have felt silenced, or marginalized by their race, gender, social status, religion, or sexual orientation.
By offering an anonymous profile dynamic aepistle hopes to achieve social unity with unrestricted authentic interactions.
Role
UI Designer
Software
Adobe XD
pencil & paper
The Design Challenge
Design for aepistle's reshare feature by creating and assembling components. Writer and social goals are to reshare articles, with and without comments, add additional media such as audio, video, images, text, or links with the potential to remain anonymous.
How Might We...
Create a way for users to reshare article posts to a community group anonymously while sharing through a user-friendly interface?
Provide a seamless reshare flow to include the addition of all features images, video, text, audio, and article links?
Create a new personalized social media experience?
Establish social unity?
Let the Sketching Begin
I started by producing wireframes of each scenario to quickly get an idea of the layout and interaction flow of each task.
I constructed screen flows breaking down the three main reshare flows:
• Reshare > Internally as an Anonymous profile user
• Reshare > Internally signed into a personal account adding audio
• Reshare >To an external platform like Instagram
Anonymous reshare flow without a comment
Reshare flow adding audio + article + photo
Adding Reshare Elements
Resharing content to community groups, and adding your own perspective to shared posts is a primary goal aepistle users complete to share their perspectives. I designed the reshare flow to add images, video, text, audio, and links.
Reshare flow adding audio + article + photo
Wayfinding
Color-code anonymous actions and profile. The purple and peach colors help users visually distinguish and recognize where they are between account actions and goals. Taking color theory into account, purple tones signify the mystery, that anonymous sharing provides.
Peach hues were used to keep consistency within aepistle's branding. Another cue for the user is a profile image associated with the account that indicates which profile you are resharing.
Anonymous Post
Two distinguishing factors
1. Purple Header
2. Anonymous Image Indicator
Account Profile Post
A Different Kind of Media
By implementing the anonymity factor aepistle allows users who have felt silenced or marginalized by their race, gender, social status, religion, or sexual orientation to freely express themselves without fear or judgment.
Interaction Design
While designing the reshare flows it gave me a few ideas of what might be a smooth flow while using the app. I created A side sliding card in which you would trigger it with a dragging swipe to activate the reshare with comment feature. This interaction reminded me of mimicking turning a digital book page.
A New Experience
In anticipation of aepistle's launch, I created 5 desktop visuals, designed to intrigue new users looking for a different way to social media. My idea behind this was to show icon clues about what could be done in aepistle yet leave mystery into the equation.
aepistle coming soon desktop proposal
Outcomes & Lessons
Working on this project I had an opportunity to focus strictly on UI design components and flow. My main challenge was constructing the reshare flow while adding additional elements. By blending familiar media components into the reshare it was helpful to see from other social media outlets what next screens may be an option. I wanted to be intentional while creating the new anonymous profile concept, which was challenging, but using color-coordination and profile imagery helped bring clarity in wayfinding through this app experience.
Because formal research was not performed per client request and timeline the UI structure was not based on data-driven design. I feel that the UI design rationale could be improved with supporting data and user testing, increasing app usability, functionality. Unfortunately, this project was outsourced soon after I joined the team. With more time I would gather insights to direct design decisions.
Next steps would have included user testing followed by iterations based on feedback from testing.