Jan 2019 - Present
As first year graduate students at Georgia Tech, my friends McKenzie, Ben, Patrick, and I noticed common difficulty we all experienced, as we entered a new environment -- students sometimes have trouble making new friends on college campuses. They may feel uncomfortable or anxious about reaching out, don’t know where to find people in the same boat, or simply don't have time in their busy schedules. People generally wished it were easier to have more connections in real life.
As we spoke to more and more people, it became apparent that there was a need for a networking platform with focus on bringing people together. Existing meetup apps such as Tinder and Bumble bombard users with endless options, which in turn, results in people endlessly chatting and swiping and rarely ever meeting in person.
We designed Pond to be an app to solve this problem. For in-depth information about the Pond platform, please feel free to visit our site here. For our design of the app, please continue below.
We started our app development process with some heavy research. We conducted multiple user interviews to see how students on college campuses were currently networking and we took note of their satisfactions as well as their frustrations.
From these interviews, as well as external research, we compiled a list of all of the solutions that currently exist, along with an affinity map of user values. We then set out to brainstorm possible solutions that our app could provide through its features.
While planning features, the first thing we did was look at our user interviews and find out the users' frustrations with commonly used methods for meeting people. Apps such as Bumble, Tinder, Meetup, etc. all felt like a chore rather than an enjoyable experience. Users noted that many times they endlessly swiped on people or chatted without ever actually meeting. Users also had a hard time actually approaching people and proposing a meeting time and place, which we also took into consideration.
For this reason I proposed a no-swipe matching, which automatically matches people on the platform if they both select the same meeting time. I also opted to leave out a chat feature, as many users noted that chatting throught apps detracts from face-to-face interactions.
The early mockups focused on a simple design meant for a shallow learning curve. I wanted our users to be able to just pick up the app and start using it right away. The features included were a "match request" where users can request a match for the day, a "time select" feature where users can select the time they want to meet that day, and finally, user profile cards with a picture, short bio, and time and place to meet the match. I suggested that users should be assigned a random location on the Georiga Tech campus, since we assumed that the main demographic of this app early on would be Georgia Tech affiliated students, and that many times, finding a place to meet is a challenge.
After multiple iterative rounds of development, user testing, and feedback, we began to solidify an app that we felt confident in releasing to the students at Georgia Tech. Named "Pond", the app encourages students to log in, select a match during the day in their free time, and end up meeting someone new at a randomly selected on-campus location, such as the Student Center or Starbucks.
Core functionality includes scheduling for the meetup, profile settings and bio creation, a matching algorithm for time-interval-based matching, and push notifications for when your match arrives at the location. After the meetup, users can give feedback to us on how their meeting went, and how polite their match was.