Play
Connecting young remote workers through physically active hobbies.
ROLE
Product Designer
TIMELINE
October 2024 - December 2024
TOOLS
Figma, Slack
SKILLS
User research
Wireframes
Prototyping
Overview
I designed an app called Play, a social fitness app that connects remote workers through active hobbies. My contributions for this project including designing the search page, the forum page, and onboarding pages. I also spearheaded our user research and created Play's design system.
Background
Since graduating college, many of my friends and I talk about how hard it is to make friends as an adult. Everyone’s moved to different cities across the U.S., as seen by my Find My app depicted on the right.
A lot of my friends work remotely, so I was curious if working remotely was a large reason as to why people felt lonely.
Target User Segment
Since young adults aged (24 to 35) make up the majority of remote workers, we decided to focus on this user segment during our user research.
Why this matters now
$154 billion
lost annually due to absenteeism + loneliness
35%
of U.S. workers are working fully from home
The Problem
Young remote workers often struggle with loneliness due to social isolation.
Our Solution
To solve this problem, we created Play, a social fitness app that connects young remote workers to others through physically active hobbies.
To learn how I got to this solution, read my full process below :)
Research
We launched a survey across 4 platforms to learn more about what factors contributed to young remote workers feeling socially isolated and what they looked for when making friends as an adult.
Respondents mentioned physical distance from others made them feel lonely.
Because of their lifestyle, respondents weren't seeing new people frequently.
We asked ourselves…
How might we connect young remote workers to others that share similar interests?
Ideating Solutions
We brainstormed several mobile app solutions to connect remote workers to others that share similar interests as them.
1:1 Matching - User flow of finding a person and then searching for similar interests was more tedious than meeting people through an activity you both enjoy.
B2B Service - While designing a B2B solution would be an effective way to encourage young remote workers to socialize, we felt we didn’t have enough resources and time to interview business owners and thus could not design for them with our app.
All-inclusive hobbies - We felt that including all hobbies was too broad and was not specific enough to our target user segment, so we decided to try narrowing down the types of hobbies for better alignment with our target users’ wants and needs.
User Interviews
We conducted user interviews to learn what scope of hobbies young remote workers might be most interested in.
Feature Prioritization
Through our user interviews, we found that a majority of user interviewees enjoyed physical activity, doing things like weight lifting, pickleball, or volleyball. Thus, we decided to design a focused hobby app to connect young remote workers.
Usability Testing
We tested our initial lofi wireframes with 3 students to learn about users' experience with on our initial designs and note possible areas of improvement. I highlighted iterations on the Search and Forum pages that I designed.
Iteration #1
Iteration #2
Iteration #3
Iteration #4
How Play Works
Find an activity
Find events for physically active hobbies near you. Discover new hobbies, and even host your own events to meet new people!
Communicate with others
Connect with people by messaging people before an event begins, follow up with people after an activity, and directly message anyone in the group who attended your event!
Share your activity
Post about your activities with the link to the event, which can encourage others to come by and allow you to meet new people.
Branding & Style Guide
I designed this to create cohesion across our wireframes since we all worked on separate features. I chose the color orange to represent socialization as it exudes friendliness and cheerfulness. I chose teal as the secondary color since it complements orange well. I chose Poppins because it was childlike and playful, which reflects the essence of our app, Play.
Learnings
Design is rarely, if ever, linear in practice.
While familiar with the double diamond process in design, my team and I found that our design process was very iterative and cyclical in the sense that we’d go back and forth between research, design, and testing.
This practice teaches us how to better navigate ambiguity and prepare for real-world design projects!
There is an opportunity to learn every step of the way.
This was the first time I collaborated with international students on a team. There were definitely challenges with communication due to the language barrier.
However, I also found myself learning a lot due to the cultural differences. For example, they had a lot of experience with designing "super apps" in China, and it made me consider how culture influences design.
