TLDR;
Play
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.
ROLE
Product Designer
TIMELINE
October 2024 - December 2024
TOOLS
Figma, Slack
SKILLS
User research
Wireframes
Prototyping
RESEARCH
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.
RESEARCH
Target users
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.
Young remote workers between the ages 24 to 35
RESEARCH
User Interviews
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.
Physical distance.
Respondents mentioned physical distance from others made them feel lonely.
Hard to meet new people.
Because of their lifestyle, respondents weren't seeing new people frequently.
Difficulty scheduling.
53.3% of respondents said they found it difficult to coordinate time to hang out.
We found that 93.3% of respondents prioritized shared interests as a key factor when finding friends, over other factors like gender, age, and even location!
💡
How might we connect young remote workers to others that share similar interests?
IDEATION
Coming up with different solutions
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.
1:1 Matching
Similar to dating apps but instead for users to find people based on shared interests.
B2B Service
We collaborate with companies to encourage employees to socialize more.
All-inclusive
An app with a broad range of activities for users to sign up for and meet new people.
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.
IDEATION
User Interviews
We conducted user interviews to learn what type of hobbies young remote workers are the most interested in.
PRIORITIZATION
Narrowing down the solution
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.
FINAL TOUCHES
Testing with users
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
FINAL TOUCHES
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 also chose the font Poppins because it was childlike and playful, which reflects the essence of our app, Play.
THE SOLUTION
How Play works
Find an activity
Find events that fits into your lifestyle. Engage in active hobbies near you and meet new people.
Communicate with others
Connect with people by joining events. Reach out to anyone in the same event group!
Post your activities
Capture your memories and invite new people to attend! Explore what others are up to in your city.
LEARNINGS
Key Takeaways
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 projects!
There is an opportunity to learn at every step.
I collaborated with international students on a team. There were 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. It made me consider how culture influences design.