Houseparty Groups

Project for design class

TIMELINE

4 Weeks

TEAM

4 People

Overview

Houseparty is a video chat app that allows users to spontaneously join rooms with their friends. Users can jump from room to room and lock the room so other users can’t join. The primary goal of this project was to help users connect with others easily while maintaining privacy.

Key Findings

Our solution was to allow users to create persistent groups of friends that are invite only.

If you want to create a group, you have to start a call with one person, then you have to add more people individually or the other people have to open the app and join your group.

If you don’t lock your room, anybody that is on the app can join, but if you lock it, then you need to specifically invite the people you want to join.

After you do all this work to create your group room, you can’t save it so you can join it again quickly. You have to do the whole process over again.

If you create a group, only the people in the group can join the room.

If you are in the group room, other people could see that you are on, but they can’t join your room.

Users experience 3 main problems

1. Users don’t want others to ambush them as soon as they open the app

   1. With Houseparty, when you open the app, it sends a notification to all your friends that you are ‘in the house.’ They can then join your room and just start talking to you without your approval.

   2. To allow users more control, they can ‘lock’ the room they are in, which prevents more people from joining. The problem with this that users had is that other users can see if you are in a locked room.

   3. Users reported having conflicts when they log on and a friend locks their room. It can seem to people as if their friends don’t want to talk to them. This may be the case, but the fact that they can see it, is what bothers people. Users wanted a way to be on the app without anyone else knowing. Not just a locked room, but a private mode.

2. Creating groups is hard

   • People who are using Houseparty are using it for casual group conversations. It is much easier to start a conversation than on Zoom, but people would probably default to an app such as Facetime for one on one calls.

   • People like using Houseparty for group calls, but it is difficult to make a group. Users first have to invite all the people they want to their room then save the room as a group. This group is accessible later through the user’s friends list.

   • People wanted to be able to create a group with their friends and family and join it at any time without the potential of getting into unintended conversations or hurting anyone’s feelings.

3. Camera is on automatically

   • Another issue we noticed in reviews of Houseparty is when users open the app, it instantly starts their video feed. If they get a notification that friends are online or that a friend invited them to a room, they join the room with their camera on automatically.

   • When they get into the room, if their friends have their videos off and they don’t feel they are camera ready, this can cause stress or embarrassment.

We brainstormed a few ideas for how we might solve each of the main problems that users reported.