Redesigning Visual Voicemail for Android

• Role: Product Designer

  • UX research and analysis (stakeholder interviews, flows, personas and other artifacts)

  • Design (app UI and branding kit)

  • Prototyping (basic flow and interactions)

• Timeline: April - May 2023

Overview

Despite how infrequent voicemails might be for some, it is noticeably annoying when it’s time to locate and view one.

iPhone users are lucky in this regard, especially if armed with a phone plan that includes visual voicemail. The voicemail inbox is logical and looks consistent with iOS standards. However, Android users like me who make up ~50% of the adult US phone market are not blessed with an equally clean voicemail experience.

Three months of learning the development cycle and research methods later, voila my answer to Android’s, in particular Samsung’s, voicemail satisfaction gap.

How might we make accessing voicemails more enjoyable and convenient for Android users?

Conducting research

I love sitting down and talking to people about their experiences and opinions, thanks to my journalism education. In my user research, I found that I wasn’t alone in my voicemail access frustrations.

Some stories highlighted the difficulty of only being able to verbally communicate with someone because texting is impossible. (Fellow children of immigrants who can barely read their ancestral language, I see you!)

I also wanted to complement the anecdotal insights I had uncovered with statistical data — according to the Pew Research Center, 67% of Americans won’t answer a call from an unknown number but will check if a voicemail is left.

Imagine how many people risk missing a notification from their doctor or dentist because they don’t have their number saved.

The stories I encountered led me to produce two key user personas, “I miss Mom” Maisie and Reminiscent Remy, who both use their voicemail inbox as a personal memories inventory. More on that later.

Synthesis

I conducted card sort tests that revealed a few functions that users could agree on. Logically, each voicemail log should show when it was created, who it’s from, and how long the recording is.

Since these were commonly agreed upon, I treated these as my project MVPs for the short timeframe I was given.

The findings from the card sorts led me to my draft content hierarchy list which served as the basis for my app structure and user flows.

My user flows demonstrate the folder creation process which, based on my user testimonies, addresses a key reason why voicemail inboxes are hard to navigate — oftentimes our inboxes are just chronological lists with no organization method.

It was also important to me to understand their unspoken wants and needs as well. In the case of the need to classify voicemails into folders, I realized an underlying problem of the voicemail inbox is that users don’t have the ability to personalize something that could hold very personal memories.

For example, when you really like a certain selfie or photo in your gallery, you might edit its colors, draw a smiley on it, then put it in an album or favorites list, and that album could be named something sentimental.

Similarly, people have sentimental voicemails from loved ones, and I wanted to give them the function to retitle recordings (as if editing and personalizing a favorite picture) in addition to moving them to folders.

Here come the wireframes

Almost at the end! The end of just the first iteration, that is.

With my first iteration in hand, I went to usertesting[dot]com and ran two unmoderated tests. I also wanted to guarantee at least one of my test participants was an actual Samsung user, and recruited my good friend Adi to critique my work. My decision to adhere to Samsung was born out of time constraints and familiarity, and I wanted to ensure that my design was as consistent as possible with the real thing.

One major piece of feedback I received was on the Recently Deleted page. I had forgotten to add a button to restore messages in case they’d been deleted by mistake.

While my test participants reported they were pleased with the aesthetics and functions, I noticed that I could do more to look more “Samsung,” and thus adopted their toasts and blue accent color for the second iteration…

Behold, the finale: iteration #2!

Welcome to the second iteration! Having added the feedback I got from my tests and the extra Samsung-y elements, my last challenge was to animate the opening of a voicemail. (This was the detail that made me want to pull out my hair the most!)

Of course, even if the project is technically over, the mental process of constant iteration and looking for areas to improve is never over.

If I had more time to learn and implement, I would formulate a metric to see how many people adopt this new voicemail app and their satisfaction levels, probably through some sort of proxy like how many people opt into visual voicemail phone plans.

I would also try to design for beyond just Samsung; there are lots of functions that I could’ve tried to re-imagine for iOS or other OS styles.

Nonetheless, I’m really proud to be able to add this project to my portfolio and show off my hard work to the world (and to my professor 🙂).