BeReal Friendship Streaks screens
Facilitating Interactions: BeReal Friendship Streaks
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
February 2024 - May 2024
Team
Solo (just me!)
Context
"Being real" about BeReal
BeReal is a popular new social media app that promotes authenticity by prompting users to share an unfiltered photo at a random time every day.
BeReal has a reaction feature which allows users to send a “RealMoji” (a selfie) as a reaction to a friend’s post. However, many users choose to simply view their friends’ posts and exit the app. People aren’t maximizing the interactions they can be making with their friends, meaning less time is spent on app’s mission to create meaningful connections.
Example of a "RealMoji"
How might BeReal facilitate intimate personal connections by encouraging more reactions?
Research
Users aren't reacting because there's no incentive to
I wanted to understand why users forego reacting to their friends’ posts. I interviewed three college students about their BeReal experience. My insights are shown below:
Affinity diagram of user insights
All posting, no reacting
Users typically use the app to take their BeReal, quickly skim their friends’ posts, then leave the app without reacting.
Streak Motivation
Users expressed great appreciation for the “streak” reward given to those who post for multiple days consistently. The satisfaction of having a streak was a large incentive for users to post consistently.
Storing memories
All users mentioned they use BeReal to store memories because it is low-maintenance and fulfilling to see their post calendar. One user specified that they primarily use the app as a memory bank rather than a photo sharing platform.
Comfortable and casual
BeReal’s appeal lies in being able to share the everyday, non-glamorous pieces of their lives without judgment. Users have less followers and closer friends on BeReal compared to other platforms (e.g. Instagram and Snapchat).
Brainstorming
Introducing Friendship Streaks, gamifying BeReal reactions
After a brainstorming session, I identified three opportunity areas to enhance BeReal reactions:
  1. How might we make reactions fun to users?
  2. How might we make reactions quicker and simpler?
  3. How might we emphasize comfort and intimacy in the reaction process?
With these in mind, I explored three possible solutions:
1. Quick Interactions
Flow of a Quick Interactions feature
Aiming for interactions to be more aligned with users’ quick app flow, I considered a double-tap or one-tap interaction to “like” a post. The steps are inspired by Instagram, a competitor that is effective at incentivizing user interactions with other users’ content.
2. Private Interactions
Flow of a Private Interactions feature
To maintain the comfort of the app while still encouraging quick interactions, no like count would be displayed publicly. All reactions and likes would be displayed on a private messaging chat to prevent the devaluation of interactions and prevent any fear of judgment.
3. Friendship Streaks
Flow of a Friendship Streaks feature
Utilizing the same reward system from BeReal’s posting streak feature, “friendship streaks” incentivize users to use the app for greater interpersonal interaction in order to maintain a connection with one of their BeReal friends.
I moved forward with the Friendship Streaks feature because: 
  • It utilizes an already well received feature in BeReal: a streak to game-ify a desired action.
  • By leveraging a reward as positive feedback, users will be more likely to want to continue the desired action. 
  • This feature incentivizes greater time spent in the app in contrast to the other two reducing users’ time in the app.
  • It has the highest feasibility and highest impact of all the potential solutions.
A friendship streak represents a series of days in which a user has reacted to a specific friend’s post and vice versa, beginning at a minimum of 3 days. This streak’s content (the posts and their reactions) will be viewable by both parties. The streak will disregard days where one of the two users has not posted.
Exploration
How might we visualize a streak?
Different ways to view a streak
Option C would be most familiar to users (because the app already utilizes a calendar view) and would eliminate annoying scrolling to find a specific day. Further, it provides a general overview of the streak, allowing the user to see details (such as reactions) by clicking on a specific day.
Adding to a streak with non-disruptive feedback
Feedback visual iterations for adding to a streak
Option B provides a clear and simple way to notify the user that they have extended their streak. Because this feature is not the main use case, I didn’t want to interrupt a user’s viewing of the posts and others’ reactions. Therefore, I chose the simplest feedback option.
USER TESTING
Resolving confusion with clearer labels and restrictions
One of the main flows of this feature is seeing the individual posts within a streak. They are organized into days, which each day has one post for each individual.
The flow originally looked like this:
Original flow for viewing streak content within a day
However, user testing showed that it was unclear there were two posts in each day, since only the first post is shown on the cover. I drew from BeReal’s current denotation of multiple posts in one day to remedy this:
Preventing users from scrolling between days in a streak (shown by the elimination of the highlighted element)
In addition to the label, I decided to make the scrolling between posts more indicative of the number of posts in a day. Previously, a user could scroll through the entire streak, across days. Now, to make it clearer which posts are from which days, a user can only scroll within a day.
Preventing users from scrolling between days in a streak (shown by the elimination of the highlighted element)
Final Prototype
The polished, final product!
Conclusion
Next steps and takeaways
BeReal has seen unprecedented growth in the past few years, becoming a hit with young adults looking to share non-picture-perfect content in a comfortable space.
However, BeReal has the opportunity to improve the use of RealMojis, bringing the app closer to its goal of facilitating meaningful personal connections. With the implementation of Friendship Streaks, BeReal can be a place of personal content sharing and personal connection.
Reflection
Growth and lessons learned
This is my very first independent case study, and my first mobile app product design project.
This process has been an incredible learning experience. I was reminded of product design’s nonlinear process, and the necessity to be flexible. Often, your assumptions will be proven wrong and you will have to adapt your solution. I learned to embrace this uncertainty. After all, discovering the unexpected is what makes product design so fun! I look forward to using what I have learned from this project in my future product design endeavors!
Thank you for reading! <3