Chihiro Kobayashi Portfolio

Confide iOS / Android

Company Teltech

Date January 2021 - January 2022

Team 1 designer (me), 1 product manager, 2 frontend developers, 1 backend developers, 1 QA

My Role UI/UX design / Create and maintain design library / User research

Tools Figma for UX design
After Effect and Lottie for creating animation
UserZoomGo and Typeform for usability research

APP Overview Confide is a highly secure instant messaging application for Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, and Android. The application supports true end-to-end encryption, is screenshot-proof, and messages are ephemeral as they are destroyed after being read by recipients.

App Store Ratings 4.7 out of 5 (iOS)
4.4 out of 5 (Android)
As of September 2022

Problem Statements 🤔

Post acquisition, my newly formed product team immediately identified several problems/challenges that we believed could be overcome with design improvements.

App UX problems

Context is Ephemeral: Context may be lost due to ephemeral nature of how messages disappear.
Read Reciepts: Inability to determine who read the message in a group chat.
Incognito Mode: The term is too ambiguous.
Value Challenged: Many of Confide’s paid features are free in other chat apps.

Business Problems

Limited institutional product knowledge due to acquisition, POD needs to spend some time to understand how the app works, given limited information from the former team.
Original design assets were not avairable.
The app is made for exchanging highly confidential messages, not suitable for having regular conversations. Confide can not be the user’s “primary chat app” .

Approaches 🙋🏻‍♀️

Launched Recurring Usability Research Effort to Identify Existing UX Issues

Led, planned, and conducted 5 unmoderated usability research sessions in a year.
Conducted in-app surveys to gain better understanding of user needs.
Evaluated new branding that our Marketing design team proposed.

Audited App UX

Peformed a deeper inspection of app UX to identify the most critical design issues.

Created Design System

Created a design system to ensure a unified design scheme for rapid delivery of updates at scale across iOS, Android, and Desktop apps.

Design Solution #1: Add Threaded Chat to the App

Project Overview

We elected to add threading chat to address issues with the ephemeral messaging impacting conversational context. We believe users should be able to toggle on/off the ephemeral chat and line-by-line messages, as there is still a good use of the ephemeral message for the highest confidential matter.

Wireframes and Usability Tests

I wireframed out alternative chat flow for "the Confidential Mode on and off". I met periodically with stakeholders and product team members to make iterative changes to the proposed design. Then, after conducting usability tests with customers, we incorporated a combination of internal and external feedback to produce a final design.

Finalization of Design

After conducting a usability test, we tweaked UX flow and copy. Then, I created iOS, Android, and Tablet designs. Also, QA’d design implementation with our product manager and developers.