Seeds

Background

Small teams lack flexible, secure tools for data collection and visualization, limiting participation.

Objective

Create an open-source Q&A platform with customizable, privacy-focused features to boost safe data sharing.

increase in user participation via anonymous contributions;
faster data analysis through customizable visualizations;
reduction in harmful interactions with keyword filtering.

Timeline

3 month - from research and ideation to functional prototype.

Completed in January, 2023.

Role

Learning Designer
Researcher
UX/UI Designer
Prototyper

Category & Tools

UX Design

Mobile App

Figma

Context

"Academic teams and small businesses struggling with low-quality, poorly targeted survey data."

Response rates are often below 20%.

Poor targeting results in up to 50% of responses being irrelevant to research goals.

51% of people hesitate to share their opinions online due to fear of judgment.

Goal

To empower small businesses and academic teams to collect, share, and analyze high-quality data.

An open-source Q&A platform for secure data collection and visualization.

Solution

[feature_#1]

Survey Creator

Single or multi-question. Customizable. Flexible limits. Smart notifications.

[feature_#2]

Privacy Protected Collection

Everyone collects. Everyone participates.
Stay anonymous. Inspire reliable responses.

[feature_#3]

Visualization Generator

From attributes to insights. Instantly generated. Effortlessly customized.

[feature_#4]

Discover & Share

Browse recommendations or follow topics. Switch between articles and collections. Gain insights. Drive impact.

Kickoff

Early Insights

Many valuable topics are lacking data and attention, then it is often necessary to collect data by oneself. And this somehow discourages people to continue those worthwhile topics.
For those analyses that require self-collection of data, it is often difficult to find suitable participants to respond.

OPEN SOURCE

DATA COLLECTION

Q&AA

DATA VISUALIZATION

LINK TO PARTICIPANTS

CONTENT SHARING

LOW NETWORKING

CUSTOMIZATION

COMMENT KEYWORD EXTRACTION

How might it help?

From a business perspective:

Help the media (e.g., the news industry) to gather citizens' perceptions and somewhat alternative to interviews.
Helping them to generate data visualizations more easily.
It can help some small business to alleviate their dilemma of lacking data and better understand the needs of consumers.
News media or social influencer can publish articles on it to increase readership.

From a personal perspective:

Custom data collection for use in data analysis.
Connect to participants who are interested in the topic and therefore return quality responses.
Easy to generate visualizations.
Away from negative words.
Users can have access to articles driven by data on topics of their interest.

Competitor Analysis

Key Insights from Competitor Analysis

Survey tools lack a network of participants, making data scale uncertain.
Open data platforms don’t collect new data or generate quick visualizations.
Social media polls are simple, lack anonymity, and offer no access to raw data.
Seeds combines what others miss—open collection, instant visualization, anonymity, and meaningful insights.

User Research

Negative attitude of participants.

“The people who fill out the questionnaire are often not self-motivated and so are not very cooperative.”

“Normally, our surveys are sent to people we know to fill out. This is because we can't find more people to fill out the questionnaire, and this way we can guarantee the quality of the responses to a certain extent.”

2. The participants were chosen from a narrow group.

“When available, we upload our respective surveys to the school's discord to fill in with each other. However, However, this also does not guarantee the quantity and quality of the response.”
“Why not consider placing it on a larger platform?”
“There is no such a platform.”

3. Lack of (open) data source.

“As long as it is public data are considered easy to find, most difficulties happen when there is no data available.”

“Sometimes a topic comes to mind that I think is good, but once research, there is no data to support it and I feel so discouraged.”

"People are often not self-motivated."

"There are no such a platform."

4. Offenses from strangers can hardly be avoided.

“I try to avoid commenting on others, as I find that mere disagreement can lead to offensive words.”

“I wondered why a lot of apps didn't have anonymity, and then I realized that it might be a protection for me. At least it gives me the opportunity to block him/her.”

Deeper Insights

Before I could jump into the designing, it was important define the main pain points behind those interview complaints.

WHY negative attitude?

Not feeling involved
- Users rarely get an update after filling out a survey.
  - This may be because usually participants do not receive the conclusion after filling out the survey. We can recommand the articles on similar topics after the user fills in the survey.
  - And when a user produces content based on the survey, users who have filled out the survey will also receive recommendations for articles. A positive cycle has been established to increase the initiative of users.
Wrong target participants
- Users are not interested in the topic and thus do not motivated to fill out the survey.
  - By analyzing the user's articles, bookmarks and survey preferences to refer him to surveys on topics that they may be interested in, to drive the quality of survey responses.

WHY offense can hardly be avoided?

Clearly targeted
- Most social media apps nowadays focus on developing networking features in the hope of strengthening the connection between users, and therefore rarely develop anonymity.
  - We introduced a purely anonymous answering (commenting) approach. The answer section will only show the keywords of answer. We analyze and compare the growth curve of keywords in real time. And keywords that have been mentioned more often are shown on top.
Easy to communicate
- Direct messages, reply to comments... etc. There are many different ways an unknown user could do to build a connection. Likewise, this is a potential breeding ground for cyberbullying.
  - Users can only see the extracted keywords in the comments section and cannot comment on them again.