We designed a social meet-up app that helps college students rebuild meaningful friendships in a post-COVID world. By prioritizing shared interest-based exploration, emphasizing safety and group dynamics, and eliminating dating app associations, we created a mobile tool to assist University of Washington students return to an in-person social life.
Sep - Dec 2021 (10 weeks)
Overview & Impact
How might we help undergraduate UW students discover and maintain friendships in a post-quarantine environment?
Starting with qualitative interviews and competitive analysis, we spent ten weeks exploring how social anxieties were shaping post-pandemic behavior. Based on our initial research, we created two personas and a user journey map to help visualize the context and touchpoints of our users’ current social experiences. Prioritizing clarity and accessibility, we imagined a novel connective experience built around a shared-interest model, designed the information architecture in Figma, and prototyped features that helped users rekindle old friendships and spark new ones.
Key Results
Usability testing gave us valuable feedback that shaped the final direction of our design. Users shared that swiping felt too similar to dating apps, and being matched with just one person created unnecessary pressure. In response, we introduced a shared “bucket list” system that encouraged group activities and discovery through mutual interests. This shift made the experience feel more open, inclusive, and aligned with how students actually wanted to reconnect. By simplifying the flow, improving navigation clarity, and removing uncomfortable features, we created a product that felt safer and more intuitive overall.
Discovery
Safety protocols and social anxiety shaped how students reconnected post-COVID.
We began our discovery phase by interviewing two graduate and two undergraduate UW students. Our goal was to understand how the shift from quarantine to in-person life shaped how students approached rekindling friendships. These conversations revealed pain points around COVID safety concerns, social awkwardness, and difficulty maintaining connections.
Additionally, we conducted a competitive analysis of four platforms: Discord, Meetup, Happn, and Tripr. We used our insights to identify strengths and opportunities within the current social meetup landscape. This helped us understand how students explore social opportunities today and where existing tools fall short, particularly around shared-interest discovery.
Methods
Interviews
Competitive Analysis
Sample Sizes
4 UW Students
4 Social Meetup Platforms
User Groups
Classmates
Personal Friends
Tools Used
Miro
Google Docs
Opportunity
Established-based COVID Safety Protocol.
COVID Safety
Interviewees had concerns about the safety of hanging out at specific locations during and post pandemic.
Opportunity
Connect users with similar interests.
Social Anxiety
Interviewees stated that there is more anxiety surrounding social interactions and their awkwardness.
Opportunity
Connecting users via sharable photo albums.
Instagram Worthy
Interview participants expressed under normal conditions they look for 'instagrammable' content.
Opportunity
Upload schedules to share with each other.
Maintaining Friendships
Interview participants exclaimed they struggled to maintain friendships and social circles during the pandemic.
Personas
Based on our user interviews, we created two personas that captured the motivations, frustrations, and behaviors of our target audience. They helped us empathize with post-pandemic student life and guided design decisions by keeping our users' needs at the forefront.
User Journey Map
After developing our personas, we mapped out the context of our users’ day-to-day experiences. The user journey map visualizes their thoughts, emotions, and key touchpoints as they decide to meet up with a friend for a shared activity, highlighting moments of friction and motivation.
Solution
Three core features emerged to rebuild group connection.
Building on our research, we created early concept sketches, storyboards, and interaction diagrams, eventually narrowing down our ideas into several core design requirements: support for interest-based profiles, shared planning through “bucket lists,” and context-aware exploration, to include a proprietary GPS feature and location-based COVID safety protocols.
Information Architecture
We structured the app to support social discovery, shared planning, and user control. Location information pages include details and the ability to be swiped and added to a bucket list. Messaging centers on group connection and low-pressure, interest-based socializing.
Wireframes
We built low-fidelity wireframes in Figma to test the viability of three core features:
A swipe feature for saving destinations users want to visit
A collaborative bucket list for group planning
A shared photo album to foster social bonding through content
These ideas represented our first iteration and gave us a starting point for feedback.
Iteration
Feedback prompted major shifts toward group-based connection.
We conducted usability testing with four participants: two UW graduates and two current students. Each session included a pre-test interview, task-based walkthrough, and post-observation discussion, allowing us to identify pain points and uncover key usability issues.
Swipe feature lacked intuition.
Participants found the swipe feature confusing and immediately associated it with dating apps. One participant stated that it “felt like Tinder without context,” which clashed with the intent of our product. In response, we replaced the swipe gesture with a straightforward “add to bucket list” button, making the interaction clearer and more accessible without requiring onboarding.
One-on-one matching felt Intimidating.
Users expressed discomfort being matched with a single unfamiliar person, especially those who identified as introverts. Instead, they preferred features that supported group-based planning and mutual connections. We removed one-on-one matching entirely and introduced a shared-interest exploration model focused on group activities and location-based meetups.
Dating app associations created misalignment.
Even with a focus on friendship, our early interface still carried visual cues from dating apps, which made some participants skeptical of the app’s intent. To avoid misinterpretation, we revised the flow to emphasize shared experiences and mutual interests over profile-based interactions, and removed visual elements that mirrored common dating platforms.
These changes helped improve usability, platonic connectivity, and perceived emotional safety for students reentering their social lives post-pandemic. The updated design was incorporated into our high-fidelity prototype, which felt more intuitive, inclusive, and better aligned with users’ real-world expectations.
Conclusion
Reflecting on our process and identifying next steps:
This project challenged us to design for a broad and emotionally nuanced problem space: rebuilding social bonds in a post-pandemic world. Our largest design hurdle was striking the right balance between simplicity and inclusivity, while simultaneously creating a tool that felt intuitive, welcoming, and emotionally safe for a wide range of users.
While our final high-fidelity prototype addressed many of the pain points uncovered in our research, further usability testing with a larger and more diverse user group could strengthen our design decisions and uncover edge cases. In particular, we’d like to continue evolving our approach to matching, ensuring it supports spontaneous group-based discovery without drifting into familiar dating app territory.
What surprised us most was the creative momentum we found as a team. The constraints of the timeline pushed us to be decisive, but our collaboration gave us space to generate bold ideas and iterate quickly. We left the project with stronger skills in user research, prototyping, and inclusive design, as well as a deeper appreciation for the emotional complexity behind social interaction tools.
