A solo, one-month concept from March 2020: spontaneous, time-limited video calls with friends. It's here for what happened in the middle.
ROLEProduct designer · solo
PROJECTPersonal concept
TIMELINE1 month · March 2020
TOOLSFigma · Whimsical · Miro
What it isTwo-minute video rooms with friends: start one with a topic, save the moment to a shared feed, drop into a friend's.
Why it's hereThe pivot: 8 interviews → concept one (micro-journals) → lukewarm feedback → back to the research → concept two, which people responded to. Everything was mine, including the mistake.
StatusUnshipped concept Hi-fi prototype, never usability-tested. The "2-minute" mechanic is a hypothesis, not a result.
HOW TO READ THIS PAGE — artifacts carry disclosure labels: MEASURED real, checkable data · RETROSPECTIVE made after the project to document reasoning · SIMULATED illustrative, no real participants · PROPOSED a goal or plan, never an achieved result.
THE SHAPE OF THE PROJECTMARCH 2020
8
USER INTERVIEWS, AGES 18–25
2
CONCEPTS, ONE PIVOT
2 min
THE CAP, PICKED SO PICKUPS COST NOTHING
OVERVIEW
Mid-pandemic, keeping friendships alive meant Zoom fatigue and calendar Tetris. Young adults needed a way to keep up with long-distance friends that didn't run on endless texting or scheduled calls.
RESEARCH
I ran 30-minute interviews with 8 people aged 18–25 about how they keep in touch, then affinity-mapped the notes. Two insights drove everything after:
Catching up is hard because context gets lost, so conversations stay superficial.
SYNTHESIS · INSIGHT 01
Calling bonds more and tires less than texting, but scheduling it is the chore.
SYNTHESIS · INSIGHT 02
Affinity map8 interviews in Miro. Both concepts came out of the "call problems" and "text problems" clusters.
PERSONA
The insights condensed into Christy: a busy student who wants to swap life updates with long-distance friends without writing long paragraphs to everyone.
PersonaChristy, synthesized from the interviews.
“How might we redesign texting and calling to fit long-distance friendships?”
THE HMW BEHIND BOTH IDEAS
IDEA 01 MICRO-JOURNALS
The first idea crossed texting with journaling: a semi-private journal shared with chosen friend groups. One update reaches everyone, nobody owes a reply. I studied Tiny Thoughts, Daylio, and Fabriq, then wireframed entries, group sharing, and a relationship score nudging you toward neglected friends.
Prior artJournaling & relationship trackers. Concept one borrowed their low-effort update pattern.
THE PIVOT
I walked people through a Figma Mirror prototype [ADD: how many, and whether they were the original interviewees]. The feedback was polite, but nobody said they'd use it. Two comments kept repeating:
"It'd be nice to have more modes of communication, like videos or pictures."
PARTICIPANT · ROUND 1
"I still have to make efforts to update it."
PARTICIPANT · ROUND 1
The answer was already in my interview notes: people prefer calling because it's higher-fidelity and lower-effort. I was building a better way to text when the research said to fix calls. So I pivoted.
IDEA 02 LOW-PRESSURE CALLS
Glimpse had already proven strangers would do 2-minute video calls; my move was applying that cap to existing friendships, where the pickup-friction problem lives. Houseparty and Cocoon supplied the drop-in-room pattern.
Start a chatter: open a room with a topic and a 2-minute cap
Save a chatter: post the call's metadata (never a recording) to your feed
Join a chatter: hop into a friend's live room from the feed
Receive a chatter: answer now, or pass without guilt
Prior artGlimpse's 2-minute cap and Houseparty's drop-ins, borrowed and re-aimed at close friendships.
ROUND 2 FEEDBACK
The second walkthrough [ADD: n] got a different response: people described situations where they'd use it, which round one never produced. The consistent complaint, a forced default time limit, became a user-set limit in the hi-fi pass.
"I love it!! Such a fun and quick way to catch up with friends."
PARTICIPANT · ROUND 2
"I can see myself scrolling the feed to guess what my friends have been up to, like on Venmo."
PARTICIPANT · ROUND 2
THE FINAL CONCEPTPROTOTYPE, IN MOTION
01
Start a quick chat
Create a room, add a topic and a limit, invite friends.
02
Keep a log of memories
The call's description and participants go to your feed for friends to react to.
03
Join the conversation
Drop into a friend's live chatter from the feed.
AN OPEN MECHANIC
The prototype never resolved room lifetime: if rooms die at two minutes, what does "join later" mean, and how is a three-hour-old feed entry "ongoing"?
RETROSPECTIVE Room-lifetime exploration, worked out after the project. The 2020 prototype contains none of this:
Option
How it works
Trade-off
Verdict
Hard stop
Room dies at 2:00, period; feed entries become memories and "join" disappears
Purest promise: a call that literally cannot run long
Right default, but makes the feed a graveyard
Extend by consent
At 1:45 everyone sees "+2 min?"; extends only if all tap yes
Cap becomes soft; "quick call" trust erodes with every extension
Allow once per room, max; unanimity keeps the pressure social, not personal
Knock to re-open
A saved chatter's participants can "knock": accept within the hour and a fresh 2-minute room spawns
Feed becomes a call-starter: you don't join the old room, you knock for a new one
The missing piece: what "join later" should have meant
So: rooms hard-stop, the feed keeps metadata forever, and every entry is a knock target that spawns a new room. "Ongoing" badges live for the room's 2 minutes only.
REFLECTIONS
The pivot taught me more than the final screens did. That spring Houseparty surged and Clubhouse launched; the appetite for drop-in rooms was real. What stayed untested, then and now, is whether a hard two-minute cap changes pickup behavior.
PROPOSED The usability study this concept still needs, never run:
Element
Plan
Goal
Does the 2-minute cap change willingness to answer, and does the room-lifetime model survive first contact?
Participants
5 pairs of actual long-distance friends, ages 18–29; the unit of analysis is the pair, not the individual
Tasks
Start a chatter with a topic; receive one mid-task and decide answer/pass; find last week's call and knock
Success criteria
Receive-and-decide under 10 seconds without prompting; participants can explain what happens at 2:00 unaided
The real question
In the debrief: "would you have answered without the timer?"
What this can't prove
Actual pickup behavior over weeks; that needs a living prototype and a diary study
WHAT I TOOK AWAY
Polite feedback with no "I'd use this" sent me back to my interview notes.
Pivotconcept two got the response concept one didn't
