Project Spec
Timeline
Janueary 2023 ~ ongoing
Methods
Market research, user personas, UX/UI/ prototyping, branding, presentation
Distinguishment
First place winner of the Fall 2022 Design Challenge, hosted by the UX club of UT Dallas in collaboration with Bottle Rocket, AHT of UTD, and Paycom.
Overview
Invite! is a mobile application that instantly connects the users to nearby friends and acquaintances. It targets young adults and college students mainly.
In contrast to most other event planning tools, this project focuses on unplanned, impromptu get-togethers.
My Role
I took ownership of personal project management as I performed all steps of design process from problem definition and user research to final design and testing.
I am currently learning Flutter and Dart with a software developer friend to bring the application to life. Make sure to be on the lookout!
What this is all about
After years of detachment due to COVID, I have been in constant striving to bring back together the scattered friends into my life. And one day during my rounds of texting, calling, planning, and waiting for friends to come either hang out or study with me, an idea popped into my head, and so the project began. invite! is a unique event planner that is not quite a planner; rather, it is an event wing-er. It aims to pull people together at unexpected times, because what is more exciting than bumping into a friend during your awkward downtime between plans?
With the map and the interactive 'invites' decorating the main page, the application seeks to give the user a sense of belonging to the physical community nearby. The biggest roadblock expected is the fact that if there aren't many users of the invite! nearby, there wouldn't be many invites to view at all. My current solution is to make the application a marketing for itself. Utilizing the invites' property of a one-sided communication, the back end will allow users to send invites to friends without the application through regular text messages.
Design Process
Through steps of thumbnail planning, lo-fi & high-fi wireframes, and brand development, I tried to establish the simplicity of the navigation for mobile-first design using Figma as design tool.
The brand identity was created in the red scale in order to represent the main purpose of the application: notification (invitation). It grabs attention, while also representing passion and love with its softened pink hue.
Key functionalities
In forms of push notifications, the applicaton alerts user's friends of their invite to an open event. When the event is on, the map in the main page shows a visual representation of the ongoing invites by physical proximity.
The users are also allowed to set up groups and manage whom to and whom not to notify for certain invites. This will prevent any dangers from strangers, while also keeping the social groups in a manageable form.
Thoughts & Learnings
What I found the most difficult throughout the process was the design of the idea itself. How to describe the purpose of this application in a simple manner? Is the map-based UI the best solution to the problem at hand? — were some of the questions I am still constantly asking myself. Meanwhile, I also learned the importance of brainstorming as my initially incomplete ideating stage caused me to fix the design multiple times before arriving at the final prototype.
This project is ongoing. The next steps include interviewing a bigger range of user personas to gather the different potential uses of the application. I am more than excited to wrap up the final design and to start on its development.
