Potential Solutions For Interpersonal Interacting Problems On The Internet
This picture could be the best portrayal of our relationships in all sorts of dimensions: toxic love lives, suffocating feelings when being with your family, and your co-worker keeps making you feel like you are an airhead. I used to be the one who was standing in front of the bow, letting others hold the string with an arrow toward me. Until the moment I learned of something called Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a whole lot of what had happened to me throughout my life made so much more sense. However, there’s one thing I’m still wondering: what shapes one into a toxic person?
I bet you have noticed that the term(Narcissistic Personality Disorder) is mentioned much more widely in society than before, and a question that is frequently asked by sociologists and social commentators is: ‘Does social media increase the number of narcissists?’ The answer that has been conducted by many laboratories is, almost certainly, ‘yes.’
PEST Analysis — At this point, what is going on?
To have a better understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship about how social media affects the world, we are going to adopt the PEST Analysis to inspect the problem. By doing so, we can not only understand what is going on right now but also see the potential demand the market has.
How social media impacts politics and economics
Social media is taking over our cognitive functions little by little since we spend most of our time hanging out there. It’s gradually becoming our prime resource of information, connections, and entertainment. Thus, more and more new business models have sprung into being, such as influencer marketing, content marketing, and consulting firms that run digital campaigns. We all learned how Cambridge Analytica claimed to have won the White House for Donald Trump by using Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in 2016. We can’t deny that it has created so many new jobs nowadays, but it is necessary to face the damages it causes and figure out a way to work around with it.
The Problem social media caused to our society.
It weakens one’s communication skills and empathy because most of our interactions with other human beings are online right now, and the pandemic of COVID-19 is worsening the situation. Social media deprive us of the chance to have a genuine conversation with people, to learn how to tell one’s nuanced facial expression and body language, and to experience the importance of putting oneself in someone’s shoes. People feel no guilty while commenting on other’s photos with offensive opinions or ghosting others without any explanation. They can always just hit one button and block the people they don’t want to deal with, and the problem solved! People have such a need for social media consumption: the instant, colorful feedback only social media can give, they will often become bored during real conversations, resorting to their phones. People would check their phones all the time to see if the likes of their posts have increased or not as if it is the way how they value themselves. It would either leads to feelings of negativity about one’s ‘real’ life or boosting one’s grandiose ego to an unrealistic level.
Competitive Landscape
Competitive Landscape
Now we can discern some clues of how social media make one poisonous or at least have an idea of why some people have certain abnormal behaviors that are beyond our comprehension. Thus, I made a competitive landscape with the X-axis and Y-axis of the strength of the relationships and interactions. From the graph, we can notice that there’s no such social media platform that can provide an environment for you to engage in meaningful interaction with your close companions and surroundings. Most of them oversimplified the definition of relationships — your mother, teachers, boss are just a “friend” or a “follower” on your social profile, and all you do there is just liking each other posts.
What Do People Think? — Ask The Users
It’s indeed that there are some spaces for social media to be improved, but how should we start? The next step in our process of researching the possibility of what a better social media could be is the user interview.
I will target those who are the heavy users on social media and those who are tired of social media and find out how they feel about it.
User’s insight
Almost everyone I interviewed thinks the interaction they had on social media is superficial, and they haven’t been posting anything for a while. Mostly because it’s not a safe place anymore, and it’s scary to share anything personal when you have no idea who will see it. I collected some quotes from the interviews to inspect what exactly do people find wrong about social media.
“I used to be addicted to Instagram so much, and It feels good to get likes from people. However, I came to realize the I cared about the opinions from strangers too much, and that’s not healthy for me.” — Social media brings people closer, but it somehow blurs the boundary between each other.
“Normally, people wouldn’t say anything rude right in front of other’s faces, but why would they do it on the Internet?” — Maybe it’s because they take comfort in the anonymity of the Internet. People wouldn’t see their faces while they are giving offensive comments.
“People come and go, and those whom you used to be close with might drift away at some point. It’s kind of awkward that you need to change those statuses and privacy settings manually.” — We need an inspector to tell the frequency of your interaction with someone so that the system and adjust these settings automatically.
Mind Map of the potential solutions
Now that we have some basic understanding of the problem, it’s time to brainstorm some potential solutions.
So, what exactly is the product?
I hope this product can decrease the amount of narcissist and help people learn how to have a genuine connection or conversation with others. I always believe that as a human, we all have many layers and different sides in our personalities. However, the likes and followers feature is turning our relationship into a shallow influence racing game. Furthermore, we can’t receive precise feedback from each other on the Internet because we don’t see their actual reaction. It ended up leading to a problem where people make inappropriate to someone without knowing how serious the consequence it will cause. Thus, this product should be able to help people build empathy and learn to appreciate one’s character instead of only judging others with those meaningless numbers. Unlike other social media apps, we won’t display any numbers, such as followers, likes, comments. Also, the main goal of this app is to encourage users to have genuine conversations and the product can give users real-time feedback on their comments and messages to help them build empathy.
Draw out a path a user may take to reach their goal
To make the product more user-centered, literally solving the problem, we need to walk over a script that narrates out the series of actions the user will take as they get into our product. By doing so, we can put ourselves in users’ shoes and includes the features that benefit users.
User Journey — New User Perspective
I got an invitation code from my friend to this app, which is a new type of social network that is more genuine-interaction-oriented, so I downloaded the app and created an account. At first, I get to choose what topic I’m interested in, and I can send out an invite code to my three closest friends as well. If I enjoy reading someone’s article, I can subscribe to him or her so that I can get to see what other discussions they are engaging in.
User Journey — Existing User Perspective
I can choose which topic I want to share my thoughts or story. Anyone who also subscribes to this topic can see my post, and we can have a further discussion in the thread. However, each post lasts no longer than one month, and the system will remove the expired items automatically. Before I sent out my comment under someone’s article, the tone detector will tell me how my text sounds.
Understanding the paths my users might take to sign up, engage, and invite more users helped me to consider how I should design the interface and features for the product.
Wireframes
First of all, we have to scope down the idea to a scale that we can determine the goals, deadlines, and deliverables of the product. In other words, we will start designing our minimum viable product.
According to the user journey we just walked through, the main features we need to build first will be the User Profile and the Interest Networks page. Below is the wireframe of my MVP:
