Introduction
The inspiration for designing this application comes from right after the pandemic when people started to hold social gatherings and attend cultural events again. At that time, I became really excited about going to a particular play. However, the excitement didn’t last long as I found out none of my friends were available to accompany me.
To be honest, I’m not comfortable going to such events by myself. So, the first thing that came to my mind was to search the internet for an app that helps people make new friends and do different activities with them. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find one. Most of the apps available on the market were either designed for dating or were not popular in my country. On top of that, even the ones that were supposedly designed to help people make new friends were mostly used for dating.
The idea of designing such an app had been stuck in my mind since then. When I started learning user experience design, I decided it was finally time to explore this issue with the design tools I had become familiar with.
I tried to implement the Double Diamond approach as my guiding work-frame.
Discover
To better understand the potential users, their needs, and their pain points, I decided to conduct interviews through video and voice calls. I chose this research method because I wanted to collect in-depth and qualitative data. I also tried my best to avoid implicit bias by interviewing five people with a diverse set of identity profiles, such as gender, socioeconomic status, the city they live in, and personality types (specifically their extraversion levels).
To do so, I made a number of questions which are shown below:
Have you ever made friends online? If so, on what platform(s)? Did you ever meet? How was your whole experience?
How is the process of making new friends for you?
Do you find it difficult to find friends who are similar to you? Why/why not?
How do you feel about finding new friends? Do you feel you need one?
How do you feel about doing activities in your free time on your own? (the activity can vary from walking in the neighborhood to going to a concert.) Have you ever been in such a situation? If so, how often does it happen?
How far or close are the places you spend your spare time to where you live?
Before starting the interviews, I asked for the participants’ consent on recording their voices so later I could be as accurate as possible when analyzing the gathered data. I decided to use affinity diagramming to do so.
All the cards were grouped into five categories and the key findings from affinity diagramming are listed below:
Most of the participants said spending time in person is a crucial step in making friends.
Although I tried to control for the participants’ extraversion levels, all of them stated that they preferred not to go out alone regardless of being an introvert or an extrovert.
By design, the app taps into our unconscious instincts. For instance, two interviewees pointed out that the way some apps like Tinder are designed makes it inevitable not to pay attention to others’ appearance.
As participants stated they had made friends online through social media such as Instagram, Twitter, and Telegram, I concluded that although it is possible to make new connections in many social/messaging apps, there are no features that encourage users to go beyond mere conversation.
Distance plays an important role in going out in leisure time as all the participants who lived in large cities were tired of being almost an hour on the way; not to mention the high price of taking a ride.
Define
After conducting interviews and analyzing the data derived from them, I realized that I had to consider two user groups. So, I came up with two personas;
Then I wrote problem statements for both of them;
Jake is a freelance photographer who feels lonely because of living in a new environment and needs to make new friends but finds it difficult to find people around him.
Leyla has a lot of friends who don’t share the same interests as her. So she needs to find new people to accompany her to the conventions and concerts she likes to go to, but she can’t find any services that help her to do so.
Develop
At this stage, I started sketching different solutions that came to my mind.
My main focuses were:
To lessen the effect that appearance has on users when making new friends,
and to incorporate the map feature in the best way possible.
I finally came up with the following lo-fi wireframing.
I decided to have two options on top of the home page for viewing the available activities. This way, if the user prefers to find activities in a particular area of the city, they will be able to click on "By map" to see a map view of the same data.
Deliver
At this stage, I started sketching different solutions that came to my mind.
My main focuses were:
To lessen the effect that appearance has on users when making new friends,
and to incorporate the map feature in the best way possible.
After signing up, users can choose their areas of interest, so later activities will be recommended to them based on their interests.
Here, instead of finding people based on their looks, doing activities together has been given importance. People look at the list of activities others are posting. The list is filtered based on their interest and they can also add a post if they have something in mind.
On this page, all details about a specific activity can be seen. The user can also navigate to the profile of the person posting the activity, or start chatting right away if interested.
After clicking on the ‘Start chatting!’ button, the user navigates to this page where they can talk to the person posting the activity and plan on meeting each other if both of them are interested.
The prototype illustrates the user's journey as they navigate the application to connect with people who share similar interests and activities.
