Source: Freepik

Buddy Up—Case study

Spring 2016 User Experience Professional, RED Academy

Brief

The User Experience (UX) and Web Design industry is growing in Vancouver every day. Vancouver is home to multiple design-related events, talented designers and promising startups. There are multiple channels that exist, like LinkedIn, Meetup, and Dribbble, but it requires a lot of searching in order to keep track of everything and be ‘in the know’ when it comes to design industry in any specific city.

Problem

There are multiple tech events, prominent people and tech companies popping up every day, but it’s hard to filter out unnecessary information that some people might not care about.

Opportunity

To create a mobile app that will target design industry specifically and will allow everybody to get to know the community, track events and its members, as well as be able to contribute to it. This app will be specifically designed for Vancouver and sustained by Vancouver design community.

Project goals

• Provide seamless, elegant and easy-to-use app for design community
• Provide users with information on design-related events, members and projects happening in the city
• Make discovery process easy for designers for all levels; from students to prominent designers
• Allow people to share their projects and ideas, as well as create smaller communities within the platform

This project was targeting mobile devices only and we picked iOS as our target platform as iOS apps were familiar to all of us.

For this project, I collaborated with Ann Bau, Sharan Sumal and Tilda Venalainen. My role in this team was mainly design, Ann was mainly handling planning, Sharan mainly on research, and Tilda focused on our file sorting and the PowerPoint presentation (to our class and UX instructors at the end of two weeks).

And so, the user experience process began.

When we received the brief, we all looked at the existing online channels to get an idea of what they provided:

• LinkedIn,
• Meetup
• Dribbble
• Facebook
• Picatic, and
• Eventbrite

To tackle the problem we were assigned, we interviewed a few relevant individuals in the design industry to find out their behaviours and what their thoughts on networking were like. Our research uncovered the following:

Key Findings

• Networking is key — definitely an important aspect in job hunting and building meaningful connections, but quite a daunting experience when going alone.
• Be up-to-date with upcoming events happening in the city — existing channels were Facebook, Meetup, Picatic, and Eventbrite.
• Collaboration with other designers — happens more offline with familiar people/teams (i.e. in the same company) than online with strangers.
• Volunteering opportunities — almost all participants would want to join and were keen to give a helping hand.

Priority matrix: Features to consider

After analysing the interviews we conducted, we felt compelled to include all of these features into the application. However, we all found it hard to mash all of them together coherently in such a short period of time.

After discussion among the team and during mentorship, we decided that our main focus was to tackle the issue of networking being a nerve-racking process for the user.

The biggest pain-point was looking for someone to go with to the event. Design by Ann Bau.

Thus, we came up with a solution: build an app that allowed the user to easily find a person to go with.

Prototyping, testing and collaborating. Photo taken by yours truly.

We initially called the app SwtchBrd (from the word ‘switchboard’), inspired by the purpose of a telephone switchboard, as the app would help connect the user to relevant parties/places they want to be. However, after discussion, we changed the name to BuddyUp, as it’s easier to remember.

After a two iterations, including user-testing, we came up with its final concept. Its primary function allows users to: find events (filtered by location, date, category), find a buddy (filtered by profession, experience level, education) and chat with the chosen buddy (with the ability to RSVP to the event).

BuddyUp prototype (high fidelity). For full screen, click here. (Note: If you’d like to view the prototype and are having trouble, please reach out at hello@madebycasey.com)

Future Considerations

We found one function to be confusing during our user test: the ticket icon used was unfamiliar. To deal with it quickly, we added a tip prompt to aid the user. However, if time was extended, we would prefer to conduct more usability tests in order to come up with a more solid result.

We would also like to add a few extra features would have helped us tackled the issue of networking more efficiently, such as a gamification feature to encourage users to network regularly during events:

• Introduce yourself to at least 3 new people (excluding your buddy) during the event. In this activity, the user must obtain the following details in order to validate you’ve completed the activity (e.g. name, occupation/position, LinkedIn, email and phone number).

This will help the user:

• remember who s/he has met during specific events,
• keep track how many people s/he has networked, and
• carry a list of people s/he can touch base with in the future.

By having such features, it can help remind and encourage the user to actually make connections at events so that it may reduce anxiety in future events. Instead of it being a nerve-racking experience, it can be more fun and beneficial for the user.