New friends come in boxes. Alive though, don’t worry.

Let’s get empathetic, shall we?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever pretended to text to avoid an awkward situation. Now raise your hand if you didn’t for the previous question, because you were probably lying. We all did take out our phone at least once and started typing or scrolling down the Instagram feed to get out of some sort of uncomfortable situation. Let me name a few…

• Eating by myself and to feel less uncomfortable I pretended to text. Check.
• Everyone’s sitting there talking to each other so I’ll sit there and pretend to text, making it seem like I’m talking to my other friends or I’m important or something. Check.
• Sitting alone at a party and not having anybody to talk to, so I’ll pretend to text. CHECK.

Now, it’s okay, nobody is judging. We all know at some point you pass that stage, you get acquainted with the environment, you swallow that initial embarrassment and if you’re lucky enough you get some opening in somebody’s conversation and jump right in. Or this would do anybody who’s not an introvert.

Because you see, introverts are people with a great range of qualities, the biggest of them being their ability of listening, (which makes them the most appealing of friends, considering how satisfying we find to talk about ourselves all the time.) but they’re not great at making the first move. And they’re there, poor kids, lending their ears to the-self-centred-rest of the world without complaining (Start appreciating them now, because they represent 1/3 to half people in the world, meaning 2 out of 3 people you know), waiting for their biggest chance to make a meaningful connection with another interesting human being (let’s face it, most of us are shallow and not that interesting after all.)

What’s my point?

Affinity diagram was never so accurate.

Defining was the real struggle.

So yeah, introverts. Great people right? But as Lily would say:“Where’s the poop, Robin?” Because no UX designer would spend time empathising with a target group without trying to identify what their problem is (What can I say, it’s the hard life of a UX designer). And as a matter of fact they do have a problem, they can’t make the first move and break the ice with a stranger. But that’s not all. You want to know what I found out about the root of the issue? That my ux research was an almost epic fail. Because the problem here is not introverts per se, the problem is that all our most important social settings are designed for extroverts (“it’s not you, it’s me” kind of thing). Meanwhile introverts go on and on with their overthinking process and believe they can’t effectively make any friends unless somebody comes and talk to them first.

When all they need is only to get the right chance.

With the right person.

In the right setting.

…MOMENT MAL! (This empathising thing fires me up so much)

Ideate, ideate now.

Ok so we reached a point, which is the following:

“Introverts react differently to social stimulations, meaning they can’t socialise like everyone else. But since our everyday social situations are not designed to make their life any easier, they might miss on chances to get to know other people.”

The question now is how can me facilitate their way of socialising? Because don’t get fooled, introverts want to get friends as much as anybody else (we’re social animals after all, hello!), but what we perceive as pebbles in the shoe, they perceive it as a wall of rocks. And for who know what reason we foolishly believe that our way of getting to know people is in fact THE WAY, until people like Amanda (my user persona) come along and make you understand there’s no proper formula to get to know new friends. One thing is for certain though, we all deserve the same chance.

This is the reason why, in order to give everybody the opportunity to meet other people in a comfortable but still human way, I created a service that would allow them to get to know each other by exchanging personal objects. After all, you find a lot about somebody when you got through their stuff (admit it, you also open your partner’s nightstand once in a while).

Say hello to Boxes For Friends (BFF for short, in case you didn’t catch that).

Be my BFF

Prototype, test, and prototype again.

Since my solution involved creating a service, I decided my webpage shouldn’t have involved any complicated design, just a simple explanation of how the whole service works and the whole flow should be very straightforward in order to guide the user smoothly through the whole process. But then again, me and the word “simple” can’t really be paired up in the same line, so here we go again with some mid-fi that have once too many details.

aargh what’s with that alignment??!! my eyes, MY EYES!

What’s the idea behind and what problems does it solve? My users complained that all the platforms they go through to meet new people these days are leaving out the human side, so much it feels almost fake. Also introverts are very insightful, haters of small talking and lovers of meaty topics. The boxes would solve these two problems at the same time: filled with some personal items, they will allow the exchanging partners to still maintaining a real contact with the other part and also to jump already in the “let’s get personal” part.

How does it work?

1. You’ll be partnered with somebody based on your profile informations.You’re not going to learn anything about your match (well, beside their name) BEFORE you’ll send your box and receive the one made for you. The reason for this is that we don’t want to influence you during the choice of your items, we want you to feel free to include anything you feel like could tell something about your story and be yourself (after all, people should like you for who you are, not for what you think they might fancy you to be).
2. Once you’ll get a match you can start collecting your own items, which you’ll then send to the company, as we take care of the packaging and the shipping part (and to check if some weirdo included something potentially dangerous or politically incorrect).
3. There’s a chance to pick the size of the box, according to how big and juicy you want your story to be and how much you want to spend on it (we do it for the love, but we also need to pay the bills).
4. And since we don’t want this to end with just a story in a box, we’ll have a special surprise to every participant: together with the box we’ll also include a gift to provide you guys a chance to actually meet afterwards (as I said, we do it for the love)! This surprise should work as an excuse for you two to follow up and will be tailored on the (shared) interests you wrote on your profile (we’re not stalkers, but do expect some kind of “we keep your data safe” message). Meaning if you both like Michael Jackson music, we’ll provide something like the tickets for the musical “This is it” for you two to enjoy together.
5. Last but not least, since many complained about wanting their stuff back, we decided to include it the option to retrieve your personal items after the first exchange. I think it’s pretty obvious that you shouldn’t include anything too valuable for you, like your grandmother heirloom. But just to be dumb proofed, we made it clear on the website as well.
6. The rest is pretty much in your hands so, happy BFF!

And now the fun part. Because you wish the prototype part was over, but I also had to design the real product (ah, you overachiever). Which was quite the challenge to do in one day, but I have so much fun at handcrafting that I didn’t mind too much and the result was pretty nice and in line with the brand style.

Best part about this whole process was to actually test this idea on real people. So I asked Chiara (which is my roommate and this was a good chance to stop her from baking cookies on Saturday night) and my best friend Lukas to prepare their own box and be ready to make a new friend.

And guess what? They loved it. 100% success.

The only downside is that now they really hit it off and want to hang out the two of them, which is not really good for me but hey…my idea works, I can sacrifice one or two friends for this (just kidding, I feel very lonely but it’s lame to admit it so I’ll share it in a medium post).

It’s a wrap(ped box) folks!