background — 

A class project from University of Washington’s MSIM program

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!

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 meet others, 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. 

We found common pain points to be:

• loneliness both from the pandemic but also from moving to a new area if that was applicable.

• difficulty meeting others because of large class sizes (200+) or fewer options for student organizations.

• difficulty scheduling among the people they did know, everyone has their own complicated schedule and there are times where no one is available for whatever reason, ie: studying, meetings, work, other obligations etc.

Overall there is the sentiment that there’s nowhere to meet others and make friends.

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 — 

Knowing that there were already a lot of apps and services made for helping people connect, we wanted to know where we could provide the most value. Categories we organized current experiences available to students included professional development (LinkedIn, Meetup), dating (Tinder, Hinge, Bumble), and location-oriented apps (mappings with Google/Apple, scheduling meeting rooms with UW’s SCOUT, Yelp).

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. The ideal relationships that we would like students to gain would be deeper than just a platonic relationship, but not as emotionally driven compared to dating apps.

mid-fi wireframes — 

select iterations — 

final screens —