Friendzy Mobile App

Friendzy is a space for women to gather freely with the intent of making friendships. In doing so, the platform is designed to take planning and scheduling away from making plans with friends and creating more of those spontaneous meetups that have become almost non-existent since the pandemic. It also gives you incredible friend matches and suggestions of what type of friendship date you should go so your meetup is fun and inclusive.

Team

Role

Solo project

UX Research

User Testing

Wireframing

UI Design

This pandemic has posed an interesting opportunity to design a solution for meeting new people and making friends.

During the pandemic, I realized how difficult it is to make new friends and keep up with current ones. Althought the whole world was going through the same thing, it wasn’t enough to have displacement be the common factor in creating new friends. When I looked into it, initial desk research showed that 1/3 Americans feel lonely.

early thoughts and problem space

The initial desk research helped guide my discussions with 11 women from ages of 23-55 years old.

It was important to speak to a diverse age group of women so I could get more of a holistic understanding of their experiences with making new friendships. I focused primarily on what their current situation is like with friends, their challenges with making new friends, what they would like to be doing with friends, and how in need they are of friendships.

probing deeper and validating the problem

11 user interviews

synthesizing my findings

The outcomes were 4-meta-insights that helped me frame my design challenge and drive my design and ideation phases.

My design challenges were them, how might we…

- allow women to gather and engage freely without running into scheduling or timing issues?

-create a warm and welcoming foundation that fosters incredible interactions and organic friendships?

initials ideas explored

Several design sprints and rapid sketching sessions helped me come up with 12 initial ideas, 1 of which I developed to prototype and get reactions from test users.

UI design exploration

High-fidelity iterations of the key dashboard screens.

I spent time exploring the visual look of the main dashboard before implementing it across the screens. I tested out illustrations, emojies and more personalized matching screens.

core features of the final experience

personality test feature

Lessons learned and the next steps

Narrowing the project scope helped me create a more meaningful solution.

I spent a lot of time in my early ideation phases trying to come up with a solution that could work for everyone, introverts, and extroverts and I quickly realized that this wasn’t a realistic goal given the time constraints of the projects. After several rounds of interviews with users, I learned how different users’ needs were and that a solution isn’t always a one size fits all situation.