Friendzyme UX Case Study
Plan social gatherings efficiently with Friendzyme. A comprehensive case study to showcase my design process.
Introduction
Are you tired of the endless back-and-forth trying to plan outings with your friends? (same, LOL 😭)
Say hello to Friendzyme, the ultimate scheduling app designed to bring friends together, effortlessly!
Value Proposition
Friendzyme is a scheduling app that helps friend group to find the best time to meet and updates everyone with live information related to the event.
If this idea sound interesting to you, scroll down to read more!
Customer Segment
The primary customer segment of Friendzyme is socially active college students who find planning group activities a hassle.
There are three main characteristics — demographic, psychographic and behavioural characteristics that differentiate this customer group from the general population.
Demographic Characteristics
The customer segment is enrolled in college and predominantly in the 18–26 age group who have low to moderate income.
Psychographic Characteristics
The customer segment prioritises convenience and are tech-savvy individuals who prefer using digital tools to simplify everyday tasks. They desire to balance academics and leisure activities to maintain social connections.
Behavioural Characteristics
The customer segment participates in social gatherings regularly and engages highly with social and calendar apps to facilitate group activities planning. Occasionally, they make timely adjustments to their planned schedule but prefer a democratic way of decision-making.
We, as college student, are ALWAYS busy… (academics, party, relationships..)
We don’t want to waste time aligning schedules…
Friendzyme integrates seamlessly into their digital ecosystem and make planning group activities hassle-free.
Customer’s Biggest Problem
Biggest Problem
Finding a mutual time slot that suits everyone’s availability for social gatherings is a daunting task. College students have diverse and conflicting individual calendars which are packed with multiple commitments. Unexpected changes in schedules can result in adjustments to the initial plan, or worse, cancellation.
Impacts
The process of continuously checking and aligning multiple schedules, while ensuring everyone agrees to the plan can lead to stress and frustration. The time wasted in replanning meetups could be used for more productive activities. When organising gatherings becomes too cumbersome, some may opt out of social activities to avoid the hassle, compromising their college experience and friendships.
Problem Statement
College students with a busy schedule struggles to efficiently plan social activities in friend groups.
Provisional Personas
Below are the two provisional personas for Friendzyme.
These provisional personas are an accurate representation of Friendzyme’s actual customer segment after the customer interview (next section).
Customer Interviews and Analysis
To understand our customer segment better, I conducted the interviews with 5 college students and analysed their responses.
Download the Customer Interview Script for Friendzyme here.
Key Insights
Most students participate at least once per week in social activities, usually on the weekend. They play the roles of both organiser and participant. Students have little to no income and hence highly prefer budget-friendly activity. Finding a mutual time for meetups is the main challenges that people face. Sometimes, conflicting calendars and sudden rescheduling can make people feel excluded from activity.
Trends & Patterns :
- Impromptu planner tend to spend higher on social gatherings $40–60
- Flexible or advance planner spend around $20–40 per week for social events.
Unexpected Discoveries :
- Live location information is becoming increasingly important to respondents as a safety measure to know their friend’s location update and also help with estimating their ETAs.
- Students use apps that provide discount codes and deals such as fast food reward apps to keep their social cost within budget.
Competitive Research and Analysis Brief
Competitive Analysis
In February 2024, I conducted a competitive analysis study interviewing 5 UNC students and 3 other college students via Zoom and survey forms.
There are numerous direct and indirect competitors of Friendzyme that help users to find mutual time in shared calendars, for friends and families.
The strongest and most threatening competitor is the TimeTree app, developed by a Japanese company.
Among all those competitors, Howbout (direct) and FamCal (indirect) are the more prominent players in the market.
Below are the value proposition, pros, cons and competitive benchmarking of the apps.
Findings of Competitive Analysis and Opportunities
- Friendzyme is in a red ocean.
- Extra features e.g. restaurant booking, customizable event details and shareable documents in calendar can make your app stand out.
- Friendzyme is better than its direct competitors with AI-powered mutual time finder and Live Activities feature for iOS (iPhone).
- Suggested pricing model for Friendzyme : free for basic features and no subscription needed.
Key Features and Storyboarding
Some key features of Friendzyme :
- Import Calendar — Able to import and sync personal and work calendars e.g. Google Calendar.
- Mutual Time Finder — Powered by AI, this feature automatically aligns and suggest the most optimal time for meet-ups.
- Interactive Poll — Allow friends to create poll and vote to decide on event details e.g. dinner options
- Live Activities for iOS — Show the most up to date information of your trip, weather and traffic on your iPhone’s Lock Screen and Dynamic Island.
After gathering some ideas from my everyday use apps — Calendly, City Mapper, CARROT Weather and Telegram that display the key features of Friendzyme, I created the storyboard below to visualise the user flow.
Wireframing and Prototyping
Prototype Outline
- Home : User opens Friendzyme mobile app and sees a calendar view that consist of group events and details, in default month view.
- Add group event : User creates and adds a new group event to the calendar in their Friendzyme group.
- Mutual time finder : According to the date range set by user, the systems shows a few suggestions of mutual dates and time available for the group event.
- Interactive poll : User creates poll in group event to decide on event details such as location and activities.
- New event added : New event is added to calendar and user can tap on it to see event detail or make further changes such as Edit or Delete.
- Live Activities on Lockscreen : The system shows user live update of the weather and traffic, two hours before the event start time.
- Dynamic Island (Expanded presentation) : On long-press by user, the system shows details of live activities on expanded view with an action button.
- Dyanmic Island (Compact presentation) : The system only shows live, up-to-date that is key to the Live Actvity when user exits the app or on other apps.
Low-Fidelity Wireframe
I chose to sketch by hand to present my low-fidelity wireframes quickly.
High-Fidelity Wireframes
I used Figma to create the final design and prototype of Friendzyme.
The Figma file consists of these pages :
- Components
- High-Fi Design
- Prototype
Prototype
*Best viewing and interacting experience on laptop
Wait for the Figma prototype to load. Click on the screen and the blinking spots are the interactions hotspots that you can click (like a button) to interact with the prototype.
The first interaction hotspot is the clickable Home indicator — like how you usually swipe up to unlock an iPhone.
You can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate between screens.
User Research
User Research Plan
A user research plan is developed to conduct user research on college students. Each hypothesis has two to three validation questions, followed by a few screen-based tasks. There is a minimum success criteria to achieve for each hypothesis. For example, 80% of minimum success criteria means that 4 out of 5 of the participants must validate the hypothesis (e.g. a feature) for it to be successful.
User Interview & Testing
I conducted 5 user interviews at from April 22 to April 26, 2024 to test the prototype of Friendzyme and collect their feedback.
Below are the screenshots (consents given by participants) of the interview sessions and a summary of their feedback.
Findings of User Testing
Summary of Findings
Friendzyme’s value proposition is strongly validated by the targeted customer segment which is the college students. However, only 2 out of 3 key features of Friendzyme meet the minimum success criteria. The Mutual Time Finder and Interactive Poll received 100% validation from our testers and they agreed that such features will make their planning more efficient. However, the Live Activities feature (Lock Screen and Dynamic Island) failed to meet the minimum success criteria, only 2 out of 5 testers validated it.
This user testing uncovered many unseen visibility and design problems in the Friendzyme interface, including cluttered interface, confusing time information and lack of contrast between availability and unavailability time blocks. Even though these problems did not hinder the testing process significantly, it affected the user experience slightly. I will work on these problems based on the testers’ comments and suggestions.
User Testing & Detailed Feedback
The huge table below shows the detailed response of each participant to all interview questions that they were asked. Participants were asked to validate or invalidate each hypotheses based on their user experience and feedback.
Green = Validate; Red = Invalidate
Conclusion and Next Steps
This UX case study for Friendzyme has highlighted significant insights into how users interact with the app and the effectiveness of its features in simplifying group scheduling. We believe that Friendzyme’s value proposition still holds a substantial promise to stand out in the red ocean of the shared calendar app market.
Moving forward, the next steps include redesigning the interface to address the usability concerns and perform a subsequent round of user testing. Moreover, scaling up user testing to diverse demographics can uncover deeper insights, ensuring Friendzyme meets a broader range of needs and preferences in group scheduling dynamics.
Learnings and Takeaways
The three main takeaways that I gained through this project :
- Never do things last minute. Start early and iterate my design over the week.
- Do not fear of criticism or feedback from users, they helped me refine my ideas and challenged my assumptions.
- Strive for simplicity in design. A clean UI beats an over-designed interface (also, try not to get distracted by Dribble).
Credits
Thank you to my partner and friends who showed immense support in my design process. Thank you to the instructor and classmates of this course (MEJO 433 at UNC) who gave me honest feedback of my prototype during interviews and testings.
It’s a wrap!
Links to Figma
This article is a final case study submission for MEJO 433 User Experience UX Strategy and Design course at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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