*MatchBOX members have been anonymized in screencaps; any remaining names are from the UX team.
This case study is a write-up of my second experience studio in the Purdue UX program. Experience studios pair teams of UX students with a sponsor to solve a unique UX problem. As a sophomore, I learned how to navigate an exploratory problem with participatory design.
Through this project, I worked in 7 person team of UX students and our TA, professor, and sponsors. I used skills in secondary research analysis, community building, participatory iteration, and onboarding. I researched online and general community building, helped create and populate Discord channels, recruited and interacted with early adopters on the server, and worked with the team on final deliverables.
Coworking
Taken from Merriam-Webster: "being, relating to, or working in a building where multiple tenants (such as entrepreneurs, start-ups, or nonprofits) rent working space (such as desks or offices) and have the use of communal facilities."
Early adopters
The team of a small number of active, committed users who make up the majority of the content in an online community (Resnick et al., 2012)
For member communication, MatchBOX Coworking Studio uses emails and Facebook group conversations. However, these channels have been unsuccessful in fostering a feeling of belonging and community, as shown by low engagement rates from the members. Additionally, our sponsors found minimal organic, in-person community-building within the building.
We hypothesized that by creating an online community for MatchBOX, we could also facilitate a livelier in-person community at MatchBOX.
Final deliverables included:
We first needed to start the discovery phase of the current community at MatchBOX Coworking Studio and literature on community-building. Our discovery phase consisted of two parts:
Throughout the semester, our group went to MatchBOX more than 20 times during the same time on various days of the week (11:30-1:20PM, our class time) for sponsor meetings, observations, later Discord onboarding events, and also for general work time.
The space itself was great and provided a fantastic work environment: open, casual interior design, eclectic and comfortable furniture, and was still quiet enough for actual heads-down work. As a workspace, this place gets an A+!
Photograph of MatchBOX Coworking Studio stage and slide. (n.d.). The Perks of Being a MatchBOX Member — MatchBOX Coworking Studio. Retrieved 2024, from https://mbx.studio/blog/the-perks-of-being-a-matchbox-member.
As a coworking space, though, MatchBOX Studio didn't convey a sense of shared community. The space had all the elements for a fun community: a slide, conversational spaces like the coffee bar, a music playlist indicating casual work time, and friendly, welcoming staff. Instead of taking advantage of this, most people worked alone through the lunch hour and didn't initiate conversation with other people.
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View of MatchBOX Coworking Space when entering from the front door.
Despite the physical environment conveying a fun, casual atmosphere, normal working hours were almost uncomfortably quiet at MatchBOX. When one team member tried out the slide, people stared! It seemed like we broke an unspoken rule not to use it.
As a team of students who bounced ideas off each other a lot while at MatchBOX, we were often the only people in the space working together and having conversations. Our sponsors disclosed one reason for the quiet in the space: many MatchBOX members at the time were remote workers from different industries who signed up individually. Many members weren't familiar with others who worked there because there wasn't a need to collaborate on their work.
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Sign of earbud etiquette that indicates openness to conversation.
Knowing if other workers are open to conversations while working could also be difficult. MatchBOX did try to create affordances for conversation. For example, there were signs hung up of "earbud etiquette." The coffee bar was also implied to be more of a casual space in the center of everything, and some small talk would happen there during lunchtime. MBX staff would try to talk with members who weren't on call or doing other focused work. Members stuck to the status quo of keeping to themselves despite these factors.
Overall, we found a lack of togetherness and community.
This project required us to research community-building to design around and suggest ways the MBX community could be revitalized. Because "community-building" was such a broad field of study, we split into pairs to look for existing literature on relevant subtopics. I worked with another team member to research best practices for online community-building.
Miro screenshot of notes from community building papers. Summary below.
Summarized for our final presentation, our research on community building in the context of online spaces found that participation, commitment, and follow-through are crucial for building and sustaining an online community.
All secondary research presented and summarized with the steps from the "order of conversation in online communities" (Meridith, 2019).
Online communities need to:
We researched literature on online communities and discussed the current online community-building platforms based on our criteria of flexibility and customization, usability, potential for socializing, and most importantly, if the community could sustainably grow with more time and users.
Based on this, we decided Discord would be the best platform to create a sustainable online community for MatchBOX over Reddit, Slack, and GroupMe.
Presentation of the pros and cons of each of the online community platforms we researched: Reddit, Slack, Discord, GroupMe.
Reddit was easy to use and familiar to the age group of many MBX members, millennials. However, messages can get lost easily, and interactions are nestled in discussion posts, making it harder to skim as a newcomer. Reddit also requires an active moderator for posts and discussions. GroupMe was another easy platform, but there is only one "channel" or section that everyone talks in. Since MatchBOX has over 300 members, only one channel for everyone would quickly cause messages, polls, and events to become lost, too. Members also wouldn't be able to customize what content they want to see or want to mute.
Slack was most similar to Discord with its highly flexible and customizable structure. We decided not to go with Slack because of its association with business and work, which we thought would be a barrier to members authentically engaging with each other, therefore limiting community building. Additionally, Slack had a "freemium" model where its free version would hide messages from before the last 90 days, barring new members from fully engaging with the community. Switching to the paid version would incur additional costs.
Discord was the most appealing solution as it has a more casual vibe to it, with opportunities for fun interactions and many of the functions of premium Slack but for free: group voice channels, channel categories, showing all messages, bot integration, etc. The only downside we saw at the time was that its interface could be overwhelming to new users, which we addressed later in the semester.
When ideating the structure for a Discord, we needed to create a social category that would best increase the chances people will interact with each other online and offline in the MBX space. Interactions online could happen with shared interests and commonalities, leading to familiarity with new people, and encouraging people to then reach out to each other offline. Since MBX was a coworking space, all potential groupings also included some variation of a separate professional category and a category for MatchBOX space itself for our sponsors' announcements.
We split into groups of 2-3 to ideate, and my team member Sam and I came up with a channel grouping that focused on onboarding and socializing. While the team eventually based most of the Discord around another pair's sketch, our channels "lunch", for organizing lunch meetups and recommendations, and "around-town", for suggesting events and activities in Greater Lafayette, were also added.
Sam's and my whiteboard ideation of Discord groupings, focusing on community.
After agreeing on the structure, we moved into creating the Discord server. To reduce the anxiety of new users and demonstrate how to use each channel, we populated the channels with sample messages before onboarding facilitators. We also used automation via Discord bots so that minimal moderation of the server for things like daily questions and interactions was required for MBX staff.
Screenshot of the "Start Here" channel category.
"Start Here" is the first channel category members see once they join the Discord, for onboarding purposes.
Screenshot of the "MatchBOX" channel category.
"MatchBOX" is a general space for MBX-related discussions and staff announcements.
Screenshot of the "Social" channel category.
"Social" is the channel category we envisioned most people using, intended to foster organic connections and in-person meetups between members.
Screenshot of the "Makerspace" channel category.
"Makerspace" is dedicated to discussions and questions about the Makerspace at MatchBOX.
Screenshot of the "Interest Channels" channel category.
"Interest Channels" is another social channel category for members to reveal their commonalities, hopefully also creating familiarity with each other. If there was enough traction on an interest outside of the channels created, someone could suggest another interest channel be made as the server grows.
Screenshot of the "Professional Corner" channel category.
"Professional Corner" is for work-related networking, similar to events MatchBOX has hosted in the past. Since MatchBOX is a coworking space, we wondered if members would be more comfortable socializing in a more professional space.
Launching the Discord server had a slow start, but seeing members engage with each other was fun. While the server became inactive after the semester, we got proof that if the Discord server continued active facilitation with early adopters, more members could organically build community with each other at MatchBOX.
Recruitment flyer designed by team member, Claire.
As we were creating the Discord server, we were also recruiting within MatchBOX for people who could be early adopters of the server: the team of a small number of active, committed users who make up the majority of the content (Resnick et al., 2012).
We did this through word-of-mouth, putting flyers in the physical MatchBOX space, and recruiting some MBX staff members who had free time and were interested in engaging more with members.
We eventually opened our recruitment to all MatchBOX, recruiting many members during our later early adopters event.
Our Discord design worked in that MBX members were able to get to know each other more online and interacted regularly on the server during the project. Many members posted in #introductions, #pets, and in #recommendations with book recommendations to each other. These were more easy, minimal effort social interactions.
Photo of UX Team engaging with MatchBOX members during the Early Adopters event.
On the other side, people didn’t use the professional corner that we created. This may be due to the fact that we didn’t prepopulate it for fear of unintentionally signaling “only designers can post here” as we were all UX design students. Or it could tie into our previous research that people just wanted to be social. While we recruited early adopters to facilitate and start conversation, the UX team did the most facilitation of conversations on the Discord and there were only a few early adopters that were active on the server. This made it difficult as we didn’t want the server to seem like a server for us UX students.
After a month of launching the server and seeing these gaps in usage, we decided to hold an early adopters event at MatchBOX to understand perceptions of Discord. We even used pastries as an incentive for people to talk with us!
Screenshot of the UX team's Discord messages about the early adopters event in #events.
We planned to ask them questions on Discord but received minimal engagement. It turned out that hosting an in-person event was good for receiving feedback from those already engaging with Discord, and for perspectives from members who weren’t on Discord to find out how we could make it more accessible to them.
This was an event we held 1 month after launching the discord through flyers. We talked with the early adopters about the server and any recommendations they had. We also introduced, and even onboarded, some MatchBOX members who were curious but unfamiliar with the Discord. We utilized pastries as an incentive to prompt early adopters and MBX members to talk with us.
Photo of UX Team engaging with MatchBOX members during the Early Adopters event.
Our overall insights were:
Many people from the early adopters event didn’t even know what Discord was but were open to it once they found out about it. We created a Discord onboarding presentation for general members and another transition document for staff. We were planning on hosting another event specifically for onboarding, but because this was towards the end of the semester and we were running out of time, we decided to hand off the finished onboarding presentation to our sponsors so they could host their own.
All slides for the Discord Onboarding presentation for MatchBOX members.
My slides went over part of how to use Discord and customize the server to fit one's own needs with reminders, channels, and server profile.
My slides for the onboarding presentation on how to use Discord once joined.
From the in-person insights, we came up with and handed these recommendations to MatchBOX staff on how to make Discord adoption more appealing to members:
The UX team was only in charge of Discord during the semester we worked with MatchBOX, so we stopped facilitating and sending messages to encourage conversations after our final presentation.
Screenshot of a MBX staff member being unanswered in #makerspace-general
The UX team only worked with MBX during the semester that we were in charge of the Discord, so we stopped facilitating and sending messages to encourage conversations after our final presentation. Once we did that however, there weren’t many messages sent since then, so the server is inactive save for the QOTD Bot. Hopefully MBX will be able to use our final suggestions to host their own onboarding event to use and launch this server again in the future. While it lasted, there were really great interactions among members that were active and even between a staff member that was active on the server and members.
Launching and ensuring the members were active on the server was difficult. We needed to give consistent responses to encourage the use of the server, but we also needed to be wary of accidentally turning the MBX server into a server just for us. We didn't want to make it seem like we had some "power" in the community when we were only outsiders.
We learned from the early adopter event too late in the semester that initial adoption would have gone much smoother with snded hosting future informal events like this to onboard and familiarize members with Discord, the benefit of an active online community may be outweighed by the effort needed to restart and moderate one.
Finally, I wish we could have hosted at least one other onboarding event to monitor the "launch" more. This would have ensured that the online community was more solid and less prone to becoming inactive after we stopped being facilitators.
MatchBOX UX team picture, from left to right: Daniel Chin, Claire Johnson, Janna Johns, me, Alanna Xu, Sam Cunningham, and Titan Hoang.
This project was my first exposure to participatory design before I learned it in my learning studio. It was so cool to have a "living prototype" to observe how members used the server over a prolonged period instead of just a quick usability or user test session. It truly felt like user-centered design as our users had such a key role in the process, and I loved designing with users rather than simply designing for them. A year later, this formed a key part of my design philosophy as I transitioned into the professional world!
