Our Choice

after a lot of brainstorming, we decided to do a re-design of Bereal, a social app that creates a random time window each day for users to upload a photo capturing their lives on the spot. The idea of presenting the real and non-curated self intrigued us Besides, since this product is only 2 years old, we thought it had a lot of potential to be improved.

User research

Combining exploring the app by ourselves, reading through online user evaluations, and interviewing users in real life, we spotted several key problems with Bereal.

To have a more direct way of seeing the problems, below is a display of typical user complains about the original UX design:

To sum it up, there were 4 distinctive aspects of Bereal that caused user dissatisfaction and even frustrations. (Hover on each to see the details!)

With those four core problems at hands, we then began brainstorming ideas corresponding to each problem.

Problem Statement

How might we make users interact with BeReal --
with ease and joy?

Draft Prototype

We decided to focus on four interfaces of the original Bereal app and came up with a couple of alternative designs to each. This process was as fun as challenging as we were trying to get as many ideas as possible. We truly listened to users' need and drew references from other competitive apps like instagram and tiktok.

User Testing

From the second round of user interviews, we showed users our low-fi prototype and asked them to clarify whether our changes were improvements to the features offered in the original app. The overall reception was positive and the interviews agreed that the changes would enhance the BeReal experience. Below were some of the typical responses we got from interviewees.

“I disliked that I felt rushed with the 2 minute time but now it’s better that there’s a reward for being on time.” 

"I liked the addition of the video option. Sometimes I want to capture the experience with more than just a photo so I would want to see this change made on the actual app.”

“The Discovery Page seems like it has a purpose now with the tags and filters.”

With helpful feedbacks, we finally headed out to make the high-fi prototype by combining or/and ruling out alternative designs for different interfaces.

Previously we broke down the problems into four categories, so our final prototype includes five re-design ideas with a consistent style to address all these problems: we made changes on the posting mechanism, embedded information organization on the discovery page, boosted users' motivation to 'be real' on time, and enhanced the flexibility on memory and reaction features.