Touchpoint

Tell me about your friendships

I interviewed three people on their experiences making friends. My intention was to identify three different types of people who, although at different stages in life, would represent a wide base of users looking for friends.

I gathered all of this data on an affinity map, sorting by their habits, their frustrations, and their desires.

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What I learned

• Users typically don’t go out of their way to make friends.
• Users have specific preferences for activities and locations when spending time with new people.
• Users want to meet people who have similar interests and lifestyles to them.
• Users want friendships to be convenient.  

PERSONA & USER JOURNEY

Have you met Alex?

Alex Kone is a persona made up from the data I collected. She represents the very real needs, desires, and frustrations of our user base.

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The Scenario

Alex, a young professional, recently moved to Philly. She doesn’t know anybody outside of work and doesn’t know what to do with all of her free time. She’d like to meet some people, but she really isn’t the type to go up to anybody on the street.

One night, bored of browsing Netflix, Alex summons the courage to go out to a bar in the hopes of meeting some friends. Let’s follow along on her journey.

As you can see, the outing unfortunately doesn’t go so well for Alex. Her confidence wavers, and she’s left wondering how to continue her conversation, and ends up going home, resigned. Her journey, however, reveals to us opportunities for improvement—what we can solve. 

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What I learned

Based on these opportunities, we learn that Alex needs something that can…

• Provide Alex options for activities/places where she can meet new people where she feels comfortable and safe.
• Help Alex identify who would also like to make new friends.
• Match Alex to people who have similar interests as hers.
• Provide follow up activities for them to do.
• Find a way for Alex to communicate to potential friends before meeting in person.

PROBLEM & SOLUTION

Let’s distill Alex’s problem:

Alex is a young professional who just moved to a new city. She needs a different and easy way to meet and make friends because she is uncomfortable approaching people in real life.

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And, we have to ask ourselves:

How might we create safe and comfortable ways for Alex to meet people so that making friends is less daunting of a task?

IDEATION

Finding inspiration

When I think of meeting people through the internet, my first thought is Tinder. Tinder is the most iconic dating app of our generation. They perfected the game-ification of meeting people. So I thought to myself, can I utilize user’s familiarity with Tinder for my app? Perhaps, that is how users can view other’s profiles.

But, for someone as shy as Alex, would she have the courage to cold message a stranger? I wanted a way for Alex to find friends without her having to leave her comfort zone. My mind went to Craigslist.

Craigslist is an incredible resource where you can post and browse ads. You can participate actively, by posting ads declaring what you’re looking for or what you’re selling. And, you can participate passively, by  perusing the ads without the pressure of having to respond to any of them. Unfortunately, as the years have progressed, Craigslist has fallen out of vogue. Now, it isn’t uncommon to find the community page littered with posts looking for hookups.

But, I wanted to bring this community board aspect of Craigslist to the app. I wanted a space where users could post and respond to ads about looking for a friend who has this new hobby I just picked up!, for example.

There is also the problem of Alex becoming frustrated over choosing an activity she wants to invite her new friend to. I thought that a way to mediate this problem was to provide Alex with options of activities to choose from.

Thus, I created Touchpoint.

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Executing my objectives

Touchpoint is an app that…

• Allows Alex to find people with interests similar to her own.
• Generates options for activities that Alex can invite other users to participate in.
• Provides a community space for inviting and joining activities.

These intentions are brought to fruition by its features.

• Meet Friends: Connecting to profiles with interests similar to Alex’s.
• Ask to Hang: Providing options for activities that Alex can invite other users to participate in.
• Flyers: A space for users to post events on a bulletin where users can respond.

ITERATIVE PROTOTYPING

Sketching & Prototyping

Through an iterative process, I brought these ideas into fruition, working from paper sketches, to paper prototypes, to low-fidelity, digital wireframes, to mid-fidelity wireframes.

USABILITY TESTING

How enjoyable is the experience?

Unfortunately, due to time constraints I was not able to conduct usability testing for the paper prototype.

I conducted three tests to gauge the usability—the intuitiveness and enjoyability—of the initial mid-fidelity digital prototype. Because Alex is a fictional person, I took special care to identify users who broadly resembled Alex.

Then, I tasked these real-life Alexes with:

• Locating and selecting a different user’s profile.
• Contacting the user.

Through these tasks, I hoped to observe their understanding of the multiple ways to discover and contact other users as well as an innate understanding of the features themselves.

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What I learned

I uncovered some key findings.

• Although the Flyers feature was ambiguous because of its name and unfamiliarity, users found it to be their favorite feature of the app once on the page.
• Users also observed a lack of sorting and filtering for Flyers and Profiles, wanting a way to find specific flyers and people.
• Users liked the familiarity of the Meet Friends function, but wondered if the similarity to Tinder and other dating apps made finding friends less platonic.

Immediate Solutions

I made these immediate fixes:

• Change the first page users see from Meet Friends to Flyers.
• Add tags to flyers.
• Allow users to search through flyers by tags.