Roar Social is a start up company with two unique takes on social media. They want to make a social media application that can make direct impact on causes its users and influencers are passionate about through direct donation of spare change.

Each post would be be tagged with the posters chosen cause, think "Stop Homelessness" or "Search for a Cure (cancer)", then if the user is moved by the post or the cause can donate as low as a few cents with the idea that over thousands or even hundreds of views a single post can raise staggering ammounts for great causes.

The second unique take, and the part I was directly involved in, was their unique take on a users feed called the Roar Board. This idea sees posts not as a purely horizontal linear scroll, but a board of posts and ideas the users can navigate in unique and fun ways.

In this project I explore 3 ways this "Board" concept can be brought into fruition.

This direction opts to make the Board fixed similar to a map using direction swipe gestures to move around. Here I used an outline, yellow for the demonstration, indicating what content is currently in focus. When a post has been in focus it is set to the seen state indicated by the lighter gray borders clearly indifcating content that has been viewed. Lastly to make the board more navigable I included what I dubbed F'Zoom levels, the F is silent. These levels include:

Full Screen (content fills the screen for the purpose of viewing te content),

This direction is activly my personal favorite. The clarity at which the board is displayed and understood in testing made it a standout success. Users found that being able to see their content journeys made the consumption of content more engaging and game like "Can you finish the board?".

This version does present a major issue for development however as hundreds of posts would need to be organized and stored for the user to navigate and this brings up the question:

"Are boards unique to the user, tailered to their prefferences, or is the board a fixed entity generated daily and the users placement on that board is tied to their preferences?"

This direction is heavily inspired by two things: the NES Legend of Zelda's map design, and the dating application Tinder.

In contrast to the previous direction, every persons board is personalized and content is dynamically queued up. In this version the user will land on content in the Full Screen zoom level from before, but are now offered tailored options indicated by labels in each swipable direction (up, donw, left, right). As the user swipes in that direction content related to that label will slide in from that side and new labels will be generated for the new swipbable direction except fo the direction you came from which will have a label related to the post that you just left. In this version the user is able to zoom out at any time to view their "Dungeon Map" and see where they came from creating their own unique and sharable content adventures.

In contrast to the previous direction, every persons board is personalized and content is dynamically queued up. In this version the user will land on content in the Full Screen zoom level from before, but are now offered tailored options indicated by labels in each swipable direction (up, donw, left, right).


As the user swipes in that direction content related to that label will slide in from that side and new labels will be generated for the new swipbable direction except fo the direction you came from which will have a label related to the post that you just left. In this version the user is able to zoom out at any time to view their "Dungeon Map" and see where they came from creating their own unique and sharable content adventures.

Inspired by Tinder the users swipes have meaning. An example is topics loaded to the left are typically very different from the content you are on, representing the intent to see something completely different or "Swiping left" on a topic of content while swiping right will be releated content meaning the user wants something similar. Up and down have the options of being either the exact same topic like scrolling a feed or completly random ones that allow the user to jump around topic more wildly.

I love this directions ability to put the content consumption journey in the hands of the user as they directly pick what content they would like to see next every post. Users have the abiliy to really deep dive certain topics and get more of exactly what they want, but this presents its own challenge and friction, will the user always know what they want or have the congnitive focus to make this choice for every piece of content they recieve.

In our testing this turned out to be the case in addition to the dicision making severly lowering the users total content consuption for a set period of time. While this makes this direction not viable for a primay interaction for social media, the experience was still novel and engaging for shorter bursts leading me to believe that it could be used as a seasonal optional experience for a social media application.

This last direction is more inspired by the current connection we have to swiping down to get more content while still providing the user withthe ability to switch and select the topics they would like to see.

In this version the board is made up of rows each given a topic or tag that described the content withing them. The user can then navigate left and right withing a topic to see its content, using the up and down gestures to switch topics. Finally pinching to zoom out will give the users a macro view of the topics so they can quickly scroll between them to find one they are interested in.

This direction keeps it the simplest. Just lists of content grouped by common themes with a simple navigational structure. In our testing we found people got used to the controls quickly and found the layout novel. When talking to development this was also the most appoachable for an MVP build of the application.

While I dont personally think this design is the most interesting I cannot knock its simplicity and intuitiveness. I think this is a fine MVP version to show that social media does not need to be a simple vertical feed and we can dream up something more.

I loved working on this project and found myself drifing towards some early concepts Roar had on hand and how they might fit into any one of the 3 directions listed above. These included:

This is the end of the casestudy, below I will just add the GIFs of the prototypes in teh Bonus Features section for those who would like them. Thank you for reading through and I hope we get to connect soon!