Client
Here.fm
Year
2024
Services
Product Design, Strategy, Creative Direction
A Social Platform: Creating a fun, weird place for friends to chat and hangout
Here.fm is a fun and customizable social platform, allowing users to chat and hangout with friends while crafting their own unique personas and environments. I was hired as the founding designer to help bring this product to market. By rapidly iterating and launching new concepts we were able to learn what users were interested in and quickly discovered the potential of Here.
We built something fun, but something was missing. Satisfaction was up, but retention was low.
After a few months of talking to users and looking at the data, I learned that our most dedicated users were teen girls who liked to watch videos with their friends while simultaneously chatting and reacting. This helped create a persona to focus on. Throughout these conversations I learned two key additional things... First, the Here platform has a lot of features and as a result can be intimidating. Honing in on a specific use case, like watching things with friends, would help our users understand when they should use our product, leading to more clear and frequent use. And second, if a user joins Here but has no friends to join them, then their experience would be severely limited. Both problems could partly be solved by better onboarding and user education. Several prototypes and in-person testing sessions later, I had a solution that was showing promising results.
Frequency of use became the next hurdle. Not only were users not always interested in video calls, but their friends weren’t always online and available if so.
This is where our core focus shifted from active time spent in a room together to passive asynchronous activity. Chat was the most intuitive way to engage in this async behavior. And the mobile app was a very important aspect to that. So I designed a chat experience that would be on par with the fun and interactive experience of a Here room itself. Silly reactions, custom interfaces, calling friends into rooms, etc. 30M+ messages have been sent across the product since. The concept of a “single player mode” became the next focus. What could users do to entertain themselves when no one else was active? We went all in on profile customization and created shareable cards, moods, and other persona attributes that users could change to reflect their individuality, which gave them something to connect with and respond to. Users who created and engaged with these profile cards had a surprising 46% D1 retention.
The product was constantly evolving. We were always learning and making adjustments, and that came with some failures along the way.
When I originally came on board we weren’t sure if this was a tool for professional productivity or for friendly hangs. As obvious as that may seem now. At one point we tried public rooms where anyone could join, but this brought privacy and safety concerns and didn’t adhere to the whole vibe of the product. We completely redesigned the landing screen several times. Were rooms or chats the primary focus for users? These were just some of the questions that came up throughout the whole process. At the time of writing this, Here has had 1.3M+ users with 200k monthly active users. And the product is still evolving and growing.
