About uWave
uWave is a lifestyle and community platform for students to discover local and interest based content.
Role
UX/UI Designer
Industry
Social Media | IT
Platform
Mobile app
The problem
Our initial feed was limited to university community. As we opened up to more users outside university, the feed needed to be designed for general gen-Z users and their interests.
More users and generalised content led to:
More diverse content: this made it harder for users to navigate relevant content based on their interests
Larger content quantity: more content quantity made is difficult for the users to tune their feeds
Target users
uWave targets the Singapore market and aims to cater to students and gen-z users looking to find good quality content and authentic reviews as well as make social connections in the digital world.
Identifying the user painpoints and challenges
We spoke to and interviewed multiple users of social media apps. And we found out that more users and generalised content led to:
Lack of authenticity and trust: Nowadays, social media is filled with influencers doing sponsored or paid reviews, which leads to a lack of trust and authenticity.
Weak Local Features: Most social media apps lack filtering capabilities to find local, relatable content.
Lack of Emphasis on Interest-Based Communities: Currently, social media apps do not place much emphasis on bringing users together around common interests.
FROM USER INTERVIEWS
What we observed
More irrelevant content
Users were spending time on the platform, but the engagement dropped. This meant users were spending more time in finding relevant and interesting content.
Difficult to discover content
Users were finding it difficult to tune their feeds, as more users were creating content for different interests, and not limited to university issues and discussions.
Our competitors
The key competitors are Reddit, facebook, Instagram, Discord, Tiktok & Lemon 8.
Key goals
Feed Design
How may we help users seamlessly browse content based on the their interests and local community inspired.
Internal tagging system
How may we enable internal users to efficiently label and moderate the data, so that end users can easily find more relevant content.
Proposed Solutions - Feed design
Interest based-discovery
Users can personalize their experience around themes like cafés, books, fitness, or adventures.
Dedicated sections make it easy to explore content tied to specific interests, beyond just their network.
Network-based and interest based feed
Users can follow creators and communities to shape a feed centered on their connections.
Complements the interest-based feed by surfacing content from people they actively choose to follow.
Home Feed
Home feed is a network based feed, that allows users to browse and engage with content based on the following and communities.
Explore Feed
Explore feed is a interest based feed, that allows users to discover a wider range of content from more creators in a personalised way.
Explore feed with tabs like
‘For you’
Customize your ‘For you’ feed by defining the interests
Search page with keyword directives
Other feed improvements
Ability to create and consume different types of content in a mixed feed format, including text, image, video content, and polls.
Reactions allow Gen-Z users to express themselves and improve engagement with the content.
Reaction flow
Internal Content Tagging System (web)
The internal content tagging platform is a system designed for manually tagging the relevant content to improve the search results and recommendations for our users. It is designed to enable efficient tagging of content. It helped reduce the number of clicks to save time for faster tagging.
Observations - Internal Tagging System
Incorrect category selection by the users
Self-selection of content categories by the users is prone to incorrect and inconsistent categorisation of content. This leads to irrelevant content recommendation to the users.
A mandatory category selection step added friction to the users
Making the category selection mandatory before posting any content added friction to the users. We observed that many of the users stopped at this step while posting the content.
Proposed Solutions - Internal Tagging System
Build an internal system to tag, categorize, and rate content for better recommendations and guideline enforcement.
Use labeled data to train future ML-based recommenders.
Remove mandatory category selection for users to reduce posting friction.
Impact & Outcome
Engagement rate for content increased by +5% relative (from 1.01% to 1.06%)
After we improved the quality of internal tagging of content on feeds, it led to an improvement in users engaging with the content such as reacting, commenting or sharing.
Key Takeaways
Real users shape the best designs
It’s tempting to guess what a community needs, but those guesses often miss the mark. On uWave, I learned how important it is to share ideas early—whether rough sketches or working prototypes—and listen to user feedback. Their input helped shape better features and kept us from adding things people didn’t actually want.
