Clubhouse Redesign
I wanted to challenge myself as a young designer, so I redesigned Silicon Valley’s buzziest app, Clubhouse. Full case study can be found on my website (www.amylima.design/clubhouse), and on Prototypr (https://blog.prototypr.io/i-wanted-to-challenge-myself-as-a-young-designer-so-i-redesigned-silicon-valleys-buzziest-app-452c82c85ef6).
TL;DR:
I wanted to test my limits as a young designer by improving the user experience of Clubhouse, the hottest new audio conversation app on the social media scene. After speaking with both power users and novices on the app, I uncovered some specific pain points with wayfinding and discoverability in the app, which became the primary design challenge that guided my work throughout this project.
As an early beta user on the invite-only platform, I had the unique perspective of following the product’s updates (and exponential success) in real-time, and sought to challenge myself with my most ambitious project yet: redesigning Silicon Valley’s most exciting app in recent memory. No pressure.
The high-level goals of this project were:
- Improving discoverability within Clubhouse, allowing users to more easily find new rooms, people, and clubs to engage with
- Creating a more seamless Hallway experience, where users can filter find the most relevant rooms to them
UX Challenges: Simplifying a complex information hierarchy
One of the main considerations I had to take into account was the hierarchy of the main components users can interact within the app:
- People (other users of the app)
- Rooms (a virtual meeting place for audio conversations), and
- Clubs (interest-based groups rooms can be hosted under).
Beyond this, I had to consider how each of these components were connected, both interpersonally and through time: currently, a Clubhouse user’s Hallway (home screen) shows live rooms connected to the people and clubs they follow (which I’ll refer to throughout this case study as “in-network”). This makes it difficult for users to easily keep track of upcoming rooms in their network, as well as join new, out-of-network rooms.
This became a major dichotomy throughout my work: I needed to find a balance between making each of these individual parts of Clubhouse easily discoverable while maintaining — and simplifying- the web that weaves them together.
UX Solution: Streamlining the Discovery-to-Hallway pipeline
I developed a simple yet powerful UI that makes wayfinding within your hallway and rooms easier, and bringing rooms found through the discover page into your hallway a breeze.
In order for this solution to feel cohesive and not siloed, I needed to implement a near-full redesign Clubhouse, broken up into 5 main experiences.
Experience 1: The Hallway
Users wanted their hallway experience to feel more intentional and within their control. To achieve this, I established a top-level hierarchy of:
- ongoing vs. upcoming, to allow users to not only see active rooms but get a quick overview of scheduled rooms within their network
- filters by topics of interest, selected by the user during onboarding, and a
- sort rooms in your hallway by people vs clubs you follow
An additional UI decision was to only present people you follow within the rooms in your hallway. This would alleviate the current issue of ambiguity surrounding the names users currently see in the room cards in their hallways.
Experience 2: Room preview
Currently in Clubhouse, clicking on a room in a hallway immediately drops you into that room’s conversation.
Since identifying friends in any given room was a high decision factor for users joining a room, I wanted to design a way for users to see who they know inside before committing to join.
Experience 3: Discovery
Currently, discovery in Clubhouse is siphoned: users go to the Explore tab to discover people and clubs by categories and keywords, and to the calendar tab to discover both active and upcoming rooms across all of Clubhouse.
Most participants actually didn’t use these tabs to achieve their primary goal of discovery, instead adopting workarounds such as discovering clubs through user profiles, discovering people through rooms, and discovering rooms primarily through their hallway, limiting the scope of content they were being exposed to.
While I designed UI solutions to make these workarounds more seamless, I wanted the discover page to be the go-to destination to accommodate for all these use cases, allowing users to search for people, clubs, and rooms by Clubhouse’s growing topics directory, in addition to keywords.
I also integrated an additional sort functionality to further facilitate discovery.
Users also wanted an easy, lightweight solution to discover and access out-of-network rooms.
The ability to send a room from the discover feed to your hallway without committing to following that room’s moderators, corresponding club, or scheduling in your personal calendar was the biggest challenge of this project, involving many iterations in order to feel intuitive.
Experience 4: Active Users
A close cousin to the hallway, your active users screen is where all your Clubhouse people and clubs that are currently online live. 83% of users interviewed mentioned scanning this screen to quickly identify what rooms their friends are in.
I added a much-requested search bar to further facilitate friend-finding, as well as a sort drop-down menu to reach an even more important distinction: who’s actively participating in a room vs. just listening in.
Experience 5: User and Club Profiles
87% of users discover suitable clubs to follow via user profiles directly. There exists a further hierarchy within clubs: followers (who receive notifications and see club-branded rooms in their hallway), and members (who, in addition to the above, can also start club-branded rooms themselves).
In Clubhouse’s current design, the clubs a user follows vs. clubs a user is a member of are in disparate locations: in the user’s following list and at the bottom of their user profile, respectively. This was confusing to users wanting scan all the clubs associated with a particular person.
By making clubs associated with a user a consolidated metric, users visiting that profile can more easily see what clubs that person belongs to, and immediately follow without visiting a new screen.
On the club level, being able to access metadata such as previously held rooms, upcoming rooms, and club admins can help a user get a more effective overview of the club.
UI & Branding: A Case for Dark UI
In bringing all the pieces of this experience together, it became clear that adding too many visual elements would disrupt the visual hierarchy needed to move through the app with ease.
Additionally, the typical user experience on Clubhouse is already so immersive and emotive, often spanning all hours of the night — I wanted to take advantage of this use case and implement an elegant UI that emphasized Clubhouse’s few content types harmoniously.
Conclusion: Lessons Learned
Going into this project, I knew this would be an ambitious challenge for a young designer. What I didn’t know was just how intricate and all-encompassing that challenge would be.
I learned that working on a highly publicized and highly beloved product comes with a lot of external pressure and internal emotions to do right by (seemingly) everyone: power users with fierce attachment to existing structures, new users who can’t fully experience the nuance of an audio app as a static prototype, and the small but mighty Clubhouse team, who are actively iterating their product on a weekly basis, potentially launching imaginative solutions themselves for the same challenges I’m working on, or others I haven’t even imagined yet. Against a constant stream of public conversation over an exciting product that felt almost ethereal, I’ll humbly admit that there were times where this pressure got the best of me and I felt like a total imposture who bit off way more than she could ever chew.
The biggest lessons this project taught me were the delicate balance between perseverance when faced with complex challenges, grace in the wake of perceived failure, and when to be okay with “good enough” (for this iteration, of course).
In the end, I’m extremely proud of what I was able to accomplish with this project at this stage in my design journey, and often reminded myself of my favorite mantra that led me to product design in the first place:
“All I wanted was a job like a book so good I’d be finishing it for the rest of my life.”
Product design is that job for me, and I’m proud to say that while this project (and all my others) will never be fully finished, I breathed as much life into it as much as I could — I hope you enjoyed it!