Groups in Hike

Introduction

Earlier in 2017, I led a user study to better understand and empathise with the people we were building products for. In the study, we interviewed over a 100 students from across 20 colleges in 10 small towns in India. Several of the projects we picked up in 2017 as a company, came from the learnings of this study. One of the major project was a rethink of how people interacted inside groups in Hike. 

Hike has also been used by people for their private and intimate relationships. Be it couples, or a group of closest friends, everyone has found Hike to be a place to have deeper and richer conversations. Stickers have played a big role in driving these conversations. Any experiments and tweaks in stickers have shown clear implications on people's engagement, and satisfaction. Hence, any modifications to the ecosystem of stickers would have to come with a high amount of validation and data to support. We indeed made some modifications on the stickers, both for good and for worse.

My involvement

I lead the team of designers responsible to work on the chat experience inside Hike. My ownership spans from leading the overall design vision, to making quick and cheap prototypes for testing, or for conveying the ideas to the team. We work in a collaborative environment with engineers, data scientists and product managers to create thoughtful product decisions. We also actively seek out feedback from regular members and admins of groups to stay in touch with how people are using the product day-to-day.

Redesigned groups

In the most simple terms, Hike is a closed social network since it came into being five years ago. It has steadily and strongly grown, but, to grow as a sustainable business, this growth is not sufficient. Also, the user need of having large, open groups with strong moderation by the group admin, surfaced several times during our user study conversations.

Our existing user flows for creating a group, and the group info were not fulfilling this need. Hence, we started to redesign the infrastructure of how groups work inside Hike. We are constantly validating our ideas with regular members and group admins based on the user needs. The early signs of qualitative assessments have been quite positive.

New groups on Hike are also about empowering admins to control spam and ensure that members have a good experience of participating in the conversation. We have redesigned the layout of group info to be more comfortable, modular, and scalable. Admins now have even more control, with multiple simplified settings, on what kind of interactions happen in the group. 

Given the needs of people using groups, specially students, 'Shared Media' has also been rebuilt with powerful ways to scan and sort any kind of media, file or link shared in the group. No more last minute struggle to search for notes right before the exam!

But, with larger groups come larger problems. The efficiency and productivity of the group takes a dip, decisions get lost in conversations, taking the opinion of members on a matter gets particularly arduous. To solve for several of these cases, we specifically built features for group conversations to help people be more productive without losing context or breaking experience of their chat.