Overhauling the design at Muze, a chat app startup.
My Role on the Team
When I joined Muze, it had already gone viral as an app for creating quirky collages. However, the team observed that more users were adopting it as a chat app. With a few months to go before the relaunch, I redesigned the app with this use-case in mind.
Our Users
Most of our users were young, queer women. Many felt stifled in their everyday life, so they turned to hobbies like drawing and meme-making to express themselves. With this fluency in visual culture, they intuitively understood how to communicate through typography, photos, drawings, and GIF’s. For them, Muze was an app and community where they could speak their language.
Summary of Changes
Supporting chat attribution (Username and avatar)
Refining the interaction for placing messages
Improving the ergonomics of the text styling menu
Adding Author Attribution to Messages
The old version of Muze was designed a mood-boarding app, so messages didn’t need attribution. However, this became a problem in group chats where users couldn’t keep track of who sent each message.
So I designed a compromise. If messages were placed intentionally in the chat, we assumed you cared about the visual effect of the message, so attribution was excluded. If messages were sent without intentional placement, we assumed you cared more about communicating information, so attribution was included.
Old version
New version
Message Placement Usability
In the beta release of Muze, users struggled with dragging messages onto the canvas. Feedback from our Discord community revealed the issue: the chat bubble's draggable area was too small. To solve this, I collaborated with a front-end engineer to design and test a draggable area that was large enough to use, but not so large that users accidentally activated it.
Ergonomic Text-Styling
In Muze, users expressed the tone of messages by styling text. In the old version, you did this by selecting one typographic element at a time. This opened up a horizontal carousel between the keyboard and the typography menu. However, the narrow height of the carousel and its proximity to other buttons made this feature cumbersome to use.
The updated version improves this by closing the keyboard when accessing the typography menu, providing more space for easier and more accurate selection.
Old version
New version
Users loved how much they could express themselves through chat.
We launched on Nov 14th and were flooded with positive feedback. My favorite piece of feedback was: “It expands how we can communicate without voice”
