Greg Oppman
Bringing people together using technology in a more effective way. Using technology, we want to give users the freedom to be spontaneous while bringing them together with friends or helping them make new connections.
People who are looking for new opportunities to socialize, who have recently moved to a new city, people who are looking for ways to expand their social circle, or people who want to make connections outside work or school. Given an opportunity or platform to meetup with the locals or other users, these people would tap into a new and exciting way to socialize.
Our team collectively interviewed 10 people with the potential to reside in or be impacted by our domain space. The interviewees were diverse and ranged in age from 20 - 40. The interviews provided us with nice feedback and gave us new insights into how an initial ideation on this space could present value.
A general questionnaire that we followed was:
The information we obtained from the interview sessions gave us insight into many of the areas of concern raised by the participants. Putting all of the concerns together in an Affinity Map, we wereable to zero in on three key findings that we focused on for this project.Those three key findings were: Transparency of Information, Qualifications, andItems of Engagement.
We found it is important to provide people an outlet that would allow them to be transparent with their agendas and goals for using the platform and that would give them the resources to find other people with that same urge. This draws social engagement online and then transfers that social connection to the physical setting where the activity takes place. Having too much disparity between a user sharing and user searching will cause frustration leading them to be less motivated to utilize this tool. This application has the possibility to be as easy and effective as a text message while holding the power to reach the user’s local surrounding population.
Participant qualification is a metric that has not been utilized in other competitive applications in this domain. After synthesizing our interviews, we discovered that being able to understand how experienced other people are in an activity is a necessity to ensure that users place themselves appropriately in a group. Without this information, an activity could be less engaging to that user or even dangerous and an overload- all of which would deter that user from returning to the application. Allowing the user to match themselves with the right group of people will lead to a positive experience and encourage them to interact with the application again.
Items of engagement are the bread and butter to this application and serve as the motivating factors in connecting with other users. We all use our activities and lifestyle to draw analogies to and define our personalities. Requiring a user to share this information when creating their profile is important and establishes identifiers for the application to send users notifications of similar activities or events that align with the information on their profile.
We reviewed the web site, Meetup, and the mobile applications, Microsoft’s’TossUp, Free time and Google’s Who’s Down. There are several other applications in this same space but, we felt these three best represented the options available. We believe that the somewhat crowded space for ways to use technology to meet friends validates the legitimacy of our concept.
Synthesizing all of the exploratory research we were able to create scenarios to guide us in deciding how the user would utilize this application and the necessary flow paths. These scenarios also allowed us to better empathize with the user and become accustomed to referring to scenarios when brainstorming functionality.
Shannon is busy with work and school and her schedule provides her with limited free time. It’s a Saturday, and she knows some of her friends are out of town. She wants to look for events that her 2nd or 3rd-degree friend connections may have set up. She opens Wudup®, looks at arts & entertainment and discovers a few options, but nothing seems fun.
She then selects sports. Several sporting events are going on and a pickup soccer match stands out to her. Shannon thinks that this looks fun and selects the event.She would like to try and connect with the event creator before joining. Using the live chat feature, Shannon calls the event creator and they chat for a few minutes. Shannon feels comfortable after talking with the event creator and decides to join the event. Once she joins the event, Shannon receives directions.
Experience mapping gave us the opportunity to see the users full flow path and the touch-points they experience. This allowed us to understand the cause and effect of paint points and success during the users’ experience. One gratifying outcome was that the user did not have to spend a lot of time in the application thereby allowing them to focus on experiencing the event they found.
We worked with paper prototyping to visualize the brainstormed concepts. Going through many different ideations with paper. We then did a cognitive walk through of a paper prototype we felt confident with. Overall we began to show how this design will evolve into the higher fidelity version.
Screen 1 shows the initial launch of app. Screen 2 shows the “Home” screen when opening the app. “Home” screen displays a map, category selection, hamburger menu and create an event “plus” button. Screen 3 shows the hamburger menu / navigation options.
Figure 2 - Screen 1 shows the “Events” page. “Events” page displays details about the event and a join button. Screen 2 shows the “Create Event” page. “Create Event” displays the required options for event creation. Screen 3 shows the map to the event
Below is a gallery of screenshots from the invision prototype we made for the application.
The main screen focuses on proximity and distance as the primary measure for locating events. The blue dot indicates the user’s current position. Through research, we discovered that sporting events was the primary event type participants would use this application to locate. We then classified other events as leisure. Both categories can be accessed at the bottom navigation interface.
This shows the initial launch of app. Screen 2 shows the “Home” screen when opening the app.
This screen the “Home” screen displays a map, category selection, hamburger menu and create an event “plus” button.
This screen shows the hamburger menu / navigation options.
Beginning screen State to creating a new event
Screen state showing the editing of notification filters by topics.
If the user joins the event they will be sent to the event screen.
Screen State after going through the process of entering content for a new event.
Screen of the profile settings and options.
Screen to manage notification settings and filters.
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How a notification sent to a person will be presented to them. They have the option to join "thumbs up" or decline "thumbs down".
Screen state of viewing users current interests.
Using the system usability scale (SUS), the minimum viable product scored a 84% which is considered an "A" with the SUS score curve.
