BREAK THE ICE, 2022
Helping students make friends by utilizing the sociology concept of “third places”
background —
This project was a group assignment for IMT 565: Designing Information Experiences, where the directions were to design, prototype, and evaluate an experience in the form of a product or service.
Other members of my group included other UW MSIM students Aishwarya Shete, Ellie Morton, Madison Colvin, and Martin Smith!
what i did —
User Research
Conceptualization
Design
Prototyping
timeline —
Spring Quarter 2022 (10 weeks)
problem —
It’s hard to make friends in a new city.
Since 3 out of 5 of us were new to Seattle, we wanted to tackle the Seattle Freeze, the widely held belief that it is difficult to make new friends in Seattle (especially for newcomers).
However, difficulty making new friends can happen in any city, especially for university students.
research —
Students are lonely, find it hard to connect with peers, and struggle with busy schedules.
We conducted field observations and interviews in communal spaces on campus and interviewed a variety students about their experiences as a UW student and within the community.
loneliness both from the pandemic but also from moving to a new area if that was applicable.
hard to form connections because of large class sizes (200+) or lack of options for student organizations
difficulty scheduling among the people they did know, everyone has their own complicated schedule
an idea —
Third Places exist widely on university campuses, but students don’t utilize them to their potential.
The experience we created to solve this problem was based on the idea of Third Places, the social surroundings separate from the two usual environments of home (First Place) and the workplace (Second Place) where socialization and conversation are primary activities.
Common examples include cafes, libraries, bookstores, etc. which are all commonly found on university campuses. However, students weren’t necessarily using them as true Third Places.
competitor analysis —
An app for finding both people and places, not just one or the other.
Knowing that there were already a lot of apps and services made for helping people connect, we compared professional development, dating, and location-oriented apps.
The differentiating factor about our idea is that it factors location, but the primary focus is the relationship that could be fostered between students that use campus spaces.
our solution —
Providing a way to find Third Places and break the ice with new friends.
main flow overview —
Get notified when near a Third Place
Let students know that there are other students interested in meeting other students nearby
Set your status to “active” and see who’s around
Profile Bios + “Tall to Me About” topics to help students find other like-minded students
Then it’s time to …
Break the Ice!
Built in messaging to help students find each other in the space.
reflections —
navigating ambiguity
With the prompt for this project simply being to “design an experience,” we as a team had to practice scoping and defining our problem space. I personally drew inspiration from the course content and questioned what an experience really is.
prioritization
Our team had lots of feature ideas for improving the experience of students finding community such as filters based on goals like mentorship or study groups. However given our limited time together, we focused on what provided the most value to the experience.
up next — Headspace Social