Friendfinder

Ksenia K

Friendfinder

Finding friends through shared activities

Mobile app

My role

UX research, synthesis, IA, user flows, UX/UI design

Focus

Human-centered UX decisions, MVP definition

Timeline

4-5 weeks

Friendfinder connects people and assists them in finding friends. Whether they are into cooking, tennis, or landscape photography, they can create their own activities or choose from existing ones. What if they have recently moved and want to make friends nearby? They can easily find people in the neighborhood who share their interests, and possibly even find individuals with similar plans for the upcoming weekend!

Today, a significant number of people find themselves with relatively small social circles, even those who live in big cities.

Finding a soulmate is a significant challenge for many people, whether they are a busy young professional, a mother on maternity leave, or someone simply looking for company or activity partners in their city.

While several services attempt to address this issue, they often fail to gain people's trust for a variety of reasons.

We decided to figure out what those reasons are and create an app that helps people find soulmates.

Introduction

About the project

Problem

Identification

People often have small social circles, even those who live in large cities.

Hard to find a company for a specific activity

Experiencing difficulties to find meaningful connections

Remote work is only reinforcing the above

Project goals

Discovery

Connecting people based on their interests and priorities, simplifying the process of finding soulmates in our busy world

Create a safe and intuitive platform that allows users to feel safe meeting and connecting with people from the internet

Allow people to join activities, meet new each other online and offline, and expand their social circles

Timeline

March

April

May

June

Understanding user needs
Conducting interviews
Competitor analysis
Information architecture

User flow
Prototyping
Wireframing
User testing

References
Typography & colors
Ui kit
Ui design

Interactive prototype
User tests & iterations
Case study wrapping
Updating portfolio

Research

Prototyping

Visualization

Case study

After defining the problem, we need to emphasize and understand our potential users. To do this, I will start with a competitive analysis to see what the market is offering at this point in time. I would also like to conduct some interviews to know how this app should feel and what I should prioritize in my minimum viable product (MVP).

I started the process by doing market research and competitive analysis to better understand who my competitors were and what they did well or poorly. I noticed that there were basic apps that allowed you to swipe between users, send them messages or likes. I searched for advanced filters, shared groups, events, online and offline activities, but nothing caught my eye.

Research

Competitive Analysis

Strenghts

Weaknesses

Variety of events and groups worldwide
Online or in-person, indoor or outdoor
Filter by range, category, demographics
Build community by location, interests, profession

Focus on finding groups of interest, not specific people
No security check
Category when exploring events - impossible to select more than one

Effortless and swift registration process
App translated in multiple languages
Ability to report or block profiles as necessary
Dedicated messaging section
Can be connected to Snapchat

No photo required, also no ID verification
Profile is not detailed enough
Lack of security leads to many fake profiles
Predefined icons instead of images
Limited search preferences

Registration is frustrating - cannot go back and make changes
No video/audio
No activities to connect people based on their interests
If there is no response, messages expire after 24 hours
Feels more like a dating site

All in one app - dating, friendship, networking
Bumble is committed to the health and safety of its users.
Search for people by interests, advanced filters
Change your home country as often as you like
Connect Instagram, Spotify
Ability to add where you are in life, bio, interests

No search by interests, preferences, location, travel mode
Majority of people do not have a completed profile (no bio, additional details, interests)
Limited functionality
No profile photo, facial recognition, weak security verification

Photo required for registration
Ability to add voice intro
Translated into many languages
Possibility to search only verified profiles (but not in the free version)
Option to add interests to your profile
TikTok / Instagram connection

Easy registration
Life photo verification
Must complete bio before chatting with people
Profile verification required
Ability to add videos to profile (available in subscription only)

No profile photo face recognition
Limited locations (country, state, global)
No details in profiles
Random search for friends or others, not by preferences
Only some people search for friends

Meetup

Hoop

Bumble

Wink

Wizz

Meetup

Hoop

Bumble

Wink

Wizz

During my research, I realized that there were no well-known direct competitors to my app and there is a huge potential for Friendfinder.

In order to identify a portrait of the user, I interviewed 10 people who agreed to participate in the research. They were people of different ages and professions, with each of them I conducted a short interview and wrote down their answers, and then based on this data a portrait of the user was compiled.

Surveys

User insights

I prefer to meet new people through shared interest-based activities.

I always talk to my friends online, but most of them are busy or far away, and I miss the times when we used to get together in person and do fun things.

I often worry about safety when meeting strangers online.

Due to my busy schedule, I don't spend much time online and would like to meet more people in a short time frame.

I would love to play basketball on a regular basis with a team if I had one.

The research helped me determine user pain points, identify solutions and decide on the functionality of the future application, removing unnecessary features and keeping the most essential for the MVP version.

From the interview findings, user attitudes and behaviors were assessed and I was able to get a better sense of the user experience. With this research, I created an empathy map and persona to guide my designs
for the target users.

Empathy map and persona

User

Thinks

How do I meet new people when I am shy of talking to strangers?
I want to plan a trip to Europe with friends
Expanding my social circle could help my career
It would be great to find a tennis partner in my area

Says

Where can I find people who share my interests
I want to spend more time with family and friends and less time at work
My friends rarely have time to travel or even find time to do anything interesting
I would like to find like-minded people and start my own basketball team

Does

Works a lot during the week and sometimes including weekends
When has some free time, he likes to plan weekend getaways
He values self-development
Often spends time with his family on weekends
He looks for fun things to do in his city and calls his friends to join him

Feels

He wants to share his thoughts with people who understand him
He needs to exercise and be outdoors more often, perhaps play tennis or soccer
Wants to travel more with friends
Worries about the security and privacy of his information in new apps he signs up for

Goals

Alex tried using networking apps to expand his social circle, but realized that it was not what he was looking for: getting together with a group of people and finding those who lived in his neighborhood and had common interests seemed difficult and unlikely. He wanted a service that would help him find people in his area and events he could attend that would interest him.

Alex feels that networking or dating apps take a lot of time and effort to find the right people and don’t always work. He also doesn’t trust these apps because sometimes people can use other people’s photos and he’s not sure if there are any security measures in place to prevent fake accounts.

Concerns

With the data collected from my research, I developed the following user flow to organize and label the content in a way that is easily understood by users and ensures its visibility and findability.

Information Architecture

Solutions

Key project learnings

My biggest takeaway from the human-centered design process is to let the users inform the design. If the design doesn’t improve the user experience or achieve a goal, then the design is just decorative. It is important to keep testing and iterating. And throughout this process, remember that as a designer, you are not your designs. I had to keep an open mind during user testing and feedback, because there will always be hard moments that can lead to crucial changes.

Asking the right questions. After conducting a few initial interviews, I realized that asking focused but open-ended questions is important to validate my hypothesis. Without this, interviews end up with vague answers on irrelevant topics that do not answer my assumptions. Testing is an ongoing process that does not end after the user testing phase. As a designer, I am constantly balancing what is best for the user with other constraints such as time and resources. Whenever possible, keep testing because it will always lead to a better product.

Other key learnings

Learning Outcomes

Low-fidelity wireframes

Ideation

Wireframes provide a clear overview of the structure of the page, its layout, architecture, flow, functionality, and behavior.

Hi-fidelity wireframes

Design

The purpose of wireframes is to provide a visual understanding of an application early in the project to help visualize layout and structure, facilitate communication, plan user flow, enable rapid prototyping, and support early user testing to create user-friendly digital products.