Gather-Go
Social Outing Mobile App
Overview: Social outings play crucial role in fostering meaningful relationships and creating lasting memories through shared experiences. An outing mobile app plays a crucial role to enhance the planning process.
Role: UX Researcher, UX/UI designer
Toolkit: Figma, Photoshop, Miro, Google Drive, OtterAI, Zoom
UX Research
Project Overview
The Problem
Young Adults need a dedicated app to plan outings efficiently with friends that enable them to eliminate indecision, either for a future gathering or ongoing one while considering the individual personal circumstances.
The Solution
GatherGO is an innovative app that deals with the friction created by indecision while planning an outing, catering to a group of friends’ needs and wants. It provides a friendly UI that will allow users to share plans quickly, decide together, keep track of upcoming meet ups and provide excellent suggestions for the group.
Research Process
Research Plan:
The goal of this user research is to identify pain points in the planning process for social gatherings among friends with the ultimate aim to enhance the overall experience of outing logistics.
Objective:
• Understand what factors impact people’s decision processes (individually and in groups) when planning a social outing (time constraints, budget, mood).
• Understand what caused the shortcomings of the conceptual predecessor to our app, in order to avoid repeating them ourselves
Methodologies
Target Group:
Adults who are of legal age to participate in social activities that might involve long-distance journeys or activities such as clubs, concerts, and other similar events. More emphasis is given to younger generations as they tend to lean more toward technology.
1 On 1 interview:
Conduct 5 interviews that last 8-15 minutes. This will help us synthesize the user problem through the use of interview insights and an affinity map. Ultimately, we extract a user persona from this information to address the problem at hand.
Affinity Map
Empathy Map
User Persona
“Planning an outing with friends can become frustrating when we just throw around suggestions and never end up with a concrete plan, I wish there was a better way to plan an outing than the group chat”
ABOUT
• Loves socializing and spending time with loved ones.
• Dislikes arguments, wasting time, indecisiveness, and inefficiency.
• Hobbies include watching movies, different foods, traveling
NEEDS & GOALS
• Communicate better with the friend group
• Improve time management
• Efficiently/ seamlessly plan outings with friends
PAINT POINTS & FRUSTRATIONS
• Lack of prior information about outings.
• People find it hard to speak their minds freely.
• Lack of alignment of budget within the group.
• Logistics of planning outings are added stressors.
SOFTWARE & APPS
BRAND AFFLIATION
UX Design
USER STATEMENT & PROBLEM STATEMENT
User Statement
Mark Colley needs to find an efficient method to plan social outings with his indecisive friend group because the logistics of planning adds stress to his life.
UX Hypothesis/ Problem Statement
We believe that creating an outing planning assistance application for typically indecisive individuals and peer groups will greatly mitigate or eliminate tedious logistics and stress factors commonly found in such scenarios.
How might we build a mobile app that enables users to efficiently plan social outings so that the logistics of planning are not an added stressor in people’s lives?
I Like, I Wish, What If
Feature Prioritization
Value Proposition
GatherGO mobile app helps a group of adults to efficiently plan and coordinate a social outing while catering to everyone’s budget, time constraints, and mood.
Unlike GatherGO’s direct competitors who have failed, GatherGO focuses on having a modern UI design with a simple User Experience that simplifies the task of coordinating a social outing.
UI Design
Competitor Analysis
Direct Competitor
Yoller shares many functions we have also come up with for GatherGO ( track plans, create polls, chat ).
It is in Beta testing at the moment
It is targeted at teens, while we focus on young adults.
It is uncertain that public perception
User Flow Diagram
Based on user insight analysis a focus is given on 3 activities that would allow evaluate the user immediate experiences with the interface since these features attract users to try out the app. These activities were:
- Onboarding/ Sign-up
- Create outing plan
- Create a poll for the outing
Mood Board
Low-Fi Prototype
Low-Fi prototupe created in figma in order to run user test.
Users were asked to perform the tasks contemplated in user flow
It allowed us to appreciate the shortcomings in our interface before stylization
Usability Test
User Testing & Itterations
ITERATION #1
Problem: No consistent way of going
back to the previous page or
homepage.
Solution: Created a footer on every
page containing icons that navigate
to different pages, including the
homepage.
ITERATION #1
Problem: No consistent way of going
back to the previous page or
homepage.
Solution: Created a footer on every
page containing icons that navigate
to different pages, including the
homepage.
ITERATION #3
Problem: The notification icon on the top right
corner is not clickable.
Solution: Prototyped the notification icon to
open overlay on the right containing all
notifications.
Style Tile
Hi-Fi Prototype
With the style guide defined, life and identity were brought to the prototype, allowing the user to experience the look and feel aspired for the app
Key Takeaways
Future Considerations
An iteration for clearer differentiation between icons for scheduling a future outing and the icon for a suggestion plan for an ongoing outing will help the overall experience. Also it might be preferable to show invites received in the home screen and not only in notifications.
Final Thoughts
The app is considered to have room for growth, with new social features such as an internal rating system for visited places included, allowing the algorithm to generate curated suggestions for a group of friends.
For the application to function with full capacity, further user testing is required to refine the main features for planning an outing.