Oxford Dictionary has named the word of the year — “goblin mode”, the behavior of a person who is accustomed to being at home after quarantine and is not leading an active life offline. Users have learned how to build their social connections in apps — especially if their UX\UI is thought out to the smallest detail. We share insights Social Discovery Group team gained building social apps: how to discover the needs of users with a tight budget, choose the right color, and why virtual gifts are more popular than flowers or iPhones.

What do users want? Learn for $1000

It’s banal, but the app audience is your best development consultant. Even the Senior UX designer doesn’t know the user thinking patterns. From time to time, it is important to turn to UX research: it allows to identify design barriers that prevent users from completing the target action, helps to find points of growth and study user behavior. Feedback allows to test creators’ hypotheses on how their product is used by real people and save dev resources.

Collaboration with an agency usually costs a pretty penny (the entry price starts from $5,000). Testing within your team will not show the real picture, because colleagues may not fit into the portrait of the target. A cost-effective option is to use an online platform where you can select respondents from different countries. In SDVentures apps, we tried UsabilityHub and were satisfied. There are different types of tests on the platform: navigational, preference, first click, 5-second tests. The $199 Pro subscription allows to take a test with 15 respondents, but this may not be enough for a representative sample — an individual subscription plan is worth discussing.

Our colleagues have recently conducted a survey for the dating app Magnet to identify weaknesses and evaluate the app concept. In Magnet, users see cartoon avatars instead of real ones and match personalities instead of appearances.

The survey results are taken into account for future work. For example, designers noticed that the respondents did not have enough information in the provided profiles to select and start a chat. From the heatmap, it was clear that users were trying to click on the avatars, expecting some kind of action. This prompted colleagues to the idea of creating a full profile with additional information by clicking on the avatar.

It is also important to satisfy the wishes of even a small percentage of the audience. According to the results, 20% of men and 28% of women wanted to continue chatting without real photos — this is how the idea of anonymous chats appeared (in the original version of the app, after ten sent messages, the user decides whether to continue the dialogue and “show” the face).

Why do all messengers use blue?

Color has always influenced the perception of content in social apps: colors in UX work as triggers for certain emotions. For example, red attracts attention, evokes enthusiasm, and is associated with love. It is used in Tinder, Youtube, and Pinterest, where the creators try to excite users, not calm them down. Yellow is associated with positivity, sun, comfort, and warmth (Yandex, Talk, and Snapchat services use it).

Blue, representing calmness and trust, is often used by communication apps — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Skype. Users provide them with personal information, and therefore the trust factor is important here. But that is not all: color helps to set users up for calm and polite communication.

There is another, unofficial reason for the color popularity: Mark Zuckerberg has congenital color blindness. He does not distinguish between red and green, and blue is the most saturated color for him. This is how the creator determined the design of the most legendary social network in the world and set a trend in the color schemes of social media.

Each color and even shade has its own association, but we often use spectrum in interfaces — Magnet and Journey apps are among them. In this way, the user is provoked to a whole range of emotions: these products do not need either to calm down or inspire the audience, they use the whole range of feelings to get a variety of reactions from users. As we look at the gradient, our eyes and brain go all the way back and forth across the spectrum, so we experience a spectrum of different emotions.

Virtual gifts and a picture of a bird for $2,000

Virtual gifts appeared in many apps as an experiment for fun, but as a result, they began to bring companies real revenue, despite the fact only 10% of users buy them. Today it is a very popular way to monetize social apps. Interestingly, the most expensive gift in our applications, a diamond bird, costs about two thousand dollars, and the users really snap it up: the bird became the seventh most profitable among all available gifts, though it’s just a picture. The app gives the option to order a physical gift (for example, send an iPhone or flowers), but many users choose virtual ones because they provoke an instant emotional response.

Our colleagues’ immediate goals are to turn the concept of gifts into to a single, flexible, cross-platform, and cross-product gift module. This means we will be able to embed the single gift module in all company products and compare gift analytics in different apps. New gifts are made in glossy 3D style: they are bright, shiny, and ready to be picked.

These are not just pictures. These are interactive things like digital clothes that you can immediately put on during the streaming or a digital pet like Tamagotchi. Customized donation and social casino mechanics will also be introduced, where anything can become a reward: referral programs, NFT collections, and so on.

The design formula for communication apps can be roughly reduced to three points:

• test the concept among the users
• develop designs that evoke emotion
• invent unique ways for interaction (in our case, virtual gifts or gamification)

Creating unique products for communication, designers determine the speed of our lives moving online. And since the term chosen in Oxford has a rather negative connotation, thanks to online communication platforms, we can become even more socially active by turning on “social discovery mode” instead of “goblin mode”.