TightKnit Startup Idea
March 2022 - June 2022Overview
With many iterations we came down to this final mobile design. One big challenge my team had was that the market had already been saturated with many outlets that solved our original problem of just connecting people together. As our team got together to analyze what the need was in this market, we concluded that young adults needed a way to continue staying connected with their friends. With the pandemic, people had gotten more comfortable with being self-sustainable especially with the rise of resources and outlets that aim to satisfy our needs. Whether it be delivery for everything, streaming apps, remote work/school, etc. As a result, we designed an app that allows friends to stay updated on what activities they are doing along with being able to join each other on doin these activities together! At first, we planned to keep our layout to be minimalistic (similar to Venmo), however, we found that it doesn't actually portray a sense of fun that we intended to have for friends. So we updated our font and color scheme a bit along with prioritizing user engagement in making knits together in order to continue consistent relationships.
Team
Maged Waly
Me
Isaac Otero
Winnie Chen
Chuanlin Yang
Cole Franklin
Project Lead / UX Designer / User Researcher
Final Design
A 9 week project for my class, Startup Studio. I worked in a team of 6 where we designed a friend planning app from the ground up through Figma. Through this process, we investigated the need in the market through SET analysis, competitive analysis, and many interviews. According to feedback, we attempted to create an app that approach friendships being able to stay tightknit from a unique angle. It’s not about making friends, it’s about keeping them!
Original Problem
Since the pandemic, teens to young adults have struggled with finding people to continually spend time with due to increased social awkwardness and reliance on technological outlets.
Social Analysis
Since the outbreak of Covid-19 , the social distance between people has been greatly widened.
It is very common people can even stay indoors for a few weeks or a month due to remote work while enjoying various convenient and fast services at home
As college students come back to school, they feel the need to make new friends
As a result of COVID-19, there has been a great deterioration of mental health with social isolation and lack of mental health care
Anxiety is on the rise due to the many wars happening around the war, especially with Russia and Ukraine with 73% of adults feeling overwhelmed by this war.
Materialism is leading to a decline of happiness as a result of what people experienced through COVID-19
Economic Analysis
For 2022, there is an estimated projected worldwide decrease of
Global economy from 5.9% to 4.4%
Emerging markets and developing economies from 6.5% to 4.8%
Advanced economies from 5.0% to 3.9%
Emerging COVID-19 variants have resulted in higher and more broad-based inflation, especially in the U.S.
Social economic status has a very heavy impact in social interactions between peers due to the homophily principle
High unemployment rate as a result of the pandemic, but starting to decrease in 2022
Technological Analysis
Metaverse has allowed people working at home to have a chance to interact with coworkers more
Smart home technology has made living at home very convenient and secure
The health industry has also grown with new technology for connected health as well as health exams conducted by machines (remote care)
As gas prices are getting higher and people become more concerned about the state of the earth, we are moving towards non-emission vehicles (cars, ferries).
NFTs and crypto currencies are increasingly popular, and there are a lot of directions these digital currencies can be taken in online communities and the metaverse
First Competitive Analysis
The current market is already saturated with apps that are aiming to get people connected
These apps actually already do a pretty good job in increasing social connections between people
There actually isn't any real need in the market in bringing people together
First Value Flow Diagram
This is how we currently understood how most apps in the friendship making app worked
22/24 participants prefer a few deep relationships over many casual ones
15/24 have used online apps to make friends with 12 of those participants using discord
10/24 participants find themselves to be closer to their online friends than their in-person friends
19/24 participants enjoy talking to people who have different views from them
More than 50% of participants who answered, they prefer to do activities over handing out and talking
19/24 participants have made more than 2 friends over the past year
First Survey Results
Second Survey Results
All of our respondents were unlikely to use an app for finding friends
6/9 respondents do find it awkward to incorporate themselves into groups at gatherings because they feel out of place when other people know each other already
Most of them look for common interests when making new friends, one respondent said they look for people willing to be open and vulnerable
Most of our respondents do find it difficult to make new friends mostly because they think they’re awkward
4 of our respondents are recent graduates who have made friends through work and church
Shift in
Problem
As we looked back at our research, we tried to narrow our scope to be more specific to user needs. Before we wanted to make an an app that allows people to just meet up due to similar interests. Now we want to attack this problem from a different angle of how to incentivize people to come together.
We started to consider different questions of How Might We...
Create an environment for new members to smoothly transition into in-person interactions without making it socially awkward for them?
Incentivize people to try new things with other people without making it awkward?
Encourage people to connect with others using an app without making it feel like they need an app to make friends?
Allow people to get comfortable with one another through meetups?
Need
Based on our interviews results, we've seen that young adults generally...
Want deeper relationships
Find it hard to keep in touch with others that you’re not close to
Have a lack of knowledge of how to continue conversations
Here are the Questions we asked
StoryBoards
StoryBoard Interview Results
All 4 of our interviewees find it hard to interact with people they don’t know unless they are somehow able to find common ground
All 4 of our interviewees are willing to have deeper conversations when prompted to do so whether it’s through a story or a memory or something else
In the process of making new friends, all of our interviewees say they tend to seek communication with people with similar backgrounds or experiences.
All of our interviewees’ favorite memories with their friends include in person events and hangouts.
3/4 of our interviewees are more inclined to offline face-to-face communication, because it can bring more real communication experience to both sides and avoid possible misunderstandings in the process of online communication.
We decided to finalize more on the first storyboard that we made
Final Competitive Analyses
Value Flow Diagram
This is our vision for what our app will be like
TightKnit Model
Style Guideline (Draft)
MoodBoard
Sketches
Lo-fi/Mid-fi Prototypes
TightKnit Value Flow Diagram
Final Design
Final Takeaways
Finding user needs involves putting yourself in the shoes of the target audience and analyzing the different problems they may face with current solutions
Developing experience in leading a team of designers and facing ambiguity during a project
Developing more experience in user research in looking at the current market, world, and people's responses
Learning that design is about understanding a user's needs rather than finding some solution that may work