Case study: Redefining the “room” experience for Clubhouse
The Clubhouse app brings an interesting twist to social media, but it has a long way to go in providing a more intuitive user experience. Here I give it a shot!
With enough apps to fill the social media space, Clubhouse is a refreshing concept of interacting with people by voice. And with big names like Elon Musk giving it a shot, people are flocking to try the app!
In a nutshell, clubhouse allows you to follow certain topics, and based on that you will be suggested rooms in which you can voice chat with the rest of the audience. It is like a podcast where everyone can chip in. How does it make it any different from other social media platforms like Twitter — is that you don’t have to spend time synthesizing your thoughts into (limited) text. Rather you can be more impromptu and engage more efficiently with the rest of the audience.
The app is currently available only for iOS (as of Feb’21) and is admittedly different looking than other apps in general. Like the use of emoticons ✌🏽 in buttons and the friendly-looking “squircle” shaped profile pictures!
But when it comes to intuitiveness and usability, it does have problems at certain spots. And upon sharing my thoughts on the app’s UX with my fellow mates (to prune the perspective bias), they too had some views on similar lines.
Hence I decided to collect those opinions and try improving the interface with few ideas. In this article, I will only cover the “room” interface and the rest of the app in further articles.
The “Room” experience
The room interface is the heart of the application where the users spend most of their time. It has a grid for profiles of those who are present in the room and they are split between stage (speakers+moderators) vs audience (listeners). Anyone from the audience can raise their hand and the moderator then allows that person to be on the stage and speak.
Current design
The overall interface of the room is quite clean and efficient, as you get to see only the image and the first name of a person. But the problem starts when there are many people on the stage and it becomes one hell of an experience trying to figure out who’s is currently speaking. This is mainly due to the fact that the active speaker never comes up in the grid of profiles and if that person is not visible in the viewport, you keep scrolling up and down in the stage area tracking speakers.
Accompanying this rough behavior, there are other minor issues like you don’t get to see the room’s agenda or the count of speakers/audience or …
If you click a profile, there comes a bottom sheet (that’s what material design calls it) with the bio of that person and a set of actions.
Ideated design
I started by picking the most impacting problem at hand — tracking the active speaker and therefore re-did the interface for the stage area.
Another missing factor in the current design is room agenda/information and there is no way to access that while being in the room. This becomes a problem when people join the room in the middle (thereby missing the introduction by moderator) and they have no way to know what is that room exactly talking about.
Also, with people at-times switching to languages that may be unknown to some in the audience, it can be a good addition to have the language(s) in the room agenda/information and in a way regulate it 💬
Lastly, I did some changes to the profile interface as well, in order to improve the visual hierarchy of the content.
Here is how the ideated stage interface would finally look like, in action…
Conclusion
I think the above-mentioned concepts can drastically improve the room’s experience 😇 and make the user thoroughly enjoy the conversation!
That said, I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this.
Until next time — see you in a clubhouse room 👋🏼
