BeReal Redesign

Within teams consisting of 1 Design fellow, 1 Management fellow, and 1 Marketing fellow, we were meant to combine our knowledge to define and combat user pain points in a product chosen by your team in this longterm capstone project, culminating in a presentation to the entire organization, professors, and industry professionals.

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Part 1: Research and Key Findings

After a week of brainstorming potential products to focus on, we decided on BeReal, a rapidly growing photo sharing app where every day at a different time, all users can capture a photo within 2 minutes and can share, react to, and comment on their friends’ posts. We then began a 2 weeks of user research to decide whether to add a new feature or enhance an existing one.

We first started with high-level product research by scouring news articles written about BeReal’s recent success and reading through over 14,000 reviews for BeReal on the App Store.

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Primary findings:

• The overall vision for the app seems to remain the same across different articles - creating an app that deviates from current social media apps by creating an authentic way of sharing your day with friends
• App Store reviews were mostly positive (overall 4.8/5), with most issues being with the Memories feature, where users can view their previous BeReals. Many users wanted to see their friends’ memories and the comments/reactions/captions on each memory. Some users also expressed interest in adding the capability to take videos in addition to photos.

We then conducted a total of 8 user interviews with people familiar with BeReal and asked them about their likes and dislikes about the app, and observed how they interacted with the Memories feature.

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Part 2: Identifying a Target User

From our product research, we learned that BeReal’s target audience is university students. BeReal holds an ambassador program where they encourage current students and student athletes to promote the use of their product to their university peers. Form this information, we created 2 user personas sharing similar demographics, but different motivations and pain points when using BeReal.

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Part 3: Brainstorming a Solution

It was clear to our team that we needed to fix some issues with the Memories feature, as well as make some quality of life changes regarding the UI of the app itself and add a new feature to drive on-time daily engagement. From these findings, I sketched some low fidelity prototypes for potential new features.

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Part 4: High Fidelity Prototyping

Try out our live prototype here!

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Part 5: Reflection

I had a blast being able to work across industries with other fellows from product marketing and managing backgrounds, which gave me a more holistic view of the product as a whole. Special thanks to Michelle Tenin and Ethan Chang for mentoring us throughout the process and giving us advice on how we can improve our presentation. Also shoutout to my teammates Shauna and Marco, who made this 8-week project go by in a flash. Without them none of this would have been possible!